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Old 02-12-15, 09:19 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 5th, '15

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December 5th, 2015




Popcorn Time Back from the Dead as Dev Works on Full Relaunch
Kyle Nofuente

Popcorn Time is back. Again. Over a thread on Reddit, user Luretrix2k posted links on working installers on a fixed version of the program that brings back the buffet-style viewing of movies and TV shows online.

It seems that Popcorn Time will always pop back to life no matter how many times governments try to take it down.

The infamous BitTorrent client that made streaming movies and TV shows so easy that it was likened to a free version of Netflix was recently taken down, but as of this writing, Popcorn Time is back up and running.

The problem for rights holders, studios and the legal entities that represent them, such as the Motion Picture Association of America, in taking down services like Popcorn Time is that the software is open source so anyone can pick up the code, bring it back to life and redistribute it for everyone else to use online.

For example, in another proclaimed "victory" over Popcorn Time, a Dutch anti-piracy group reached an agreement with two Popcorn Time developers to stop working on the app. It's reported that these two developers didn't seem to be essential members of the core development team for one of the more popular "forks" of Popcorn Time, so the settlement may have been for naught. Nonetheless, the point is that the code on which Popcorn Time is built is free and out in the wild. Take out a developer here, and few more will pop back up to replace them.

Over Reddit, user Luretrix2k posted a thread regarding the return of a fully-functioning Popcorn Time.

"Many of you have seen the article in TorrentFreak about the two guys who were caught by Brein.They had to delete all their accounts, links and stop working on the community version immediately.This will not stop us in any way, but we will not credit any of the people involved to protect them," the redditor says in the post.

The "fix" for Popcorn Time is available for Windows, Mac and Linux-based computers from a new website where the community edition of the program is made available. The original version of Popcorn Time can still be downloaded and the fix manually applied, as well. Moreover, by making use of new APIs, movies and TV shows now show up again as they should when the app is fired up.

Naturally, credit should be given where credit is due for bringing Popcorn Time back, but in this case, security reasons prohibit that. More often than not, this version of Popcorn Time may have a limited life span just like all the other forks of the program. Still, as it is in this case, we're pretty sure Popcorn Time will find a way to pop back up online.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/11...l-relaunch.htm





Mp3.com Founder Launches Radio Search Service, Talks Copyright

Robertson says his Mp3.com service should have been seen as a social benefit, just as Google’s book-search service was.
Mathew Ingram

Michael Robertson clearly enjoys going up against corporations much larger than his, since his career consists of doing that across a wide range of different technology areas, from online music to operating systems. One of the most infamous was his digital music company Mp3.com, which triggered one of the highest-profile copyright infringement lawsuits of the 1990s and ended with a $53-million penalty against the company.

Robertson also started a Linux-based competitor to Windows that was originally called Lindows. Software giant Microsoft MSFT 0.45% sued, alleging that the name was too similar to the name of its operating system, but settled before it went to trial. As part of the deal, which involved a $10 million payment by Microsoft, the software was renamed Linspire. Robertson also built a Skype-style voice-over-IP service called Gizmo5, which he eventually sold to Google GOOG 0.28% .

The serial entrepreneur is now working on several new ventures, one of which is called OnRadio. The service, introduced this week, indexes all the music playing on more than 100,000 online radio stations and allows users to search across that database and listen to any song. It also lets them share those songs through a variety of chat applications such as Snapchat and Twitter, using a unique URL.

“Because Google doesn’t index online radio streams, radio is invisible to searchers and radio companies are missing out on more than 100 million users per day,” Robertson said in a statement. “Our goal at OnRad.io is to make it one-click easy to find any song playing on the radio and to easily share those songs with friends.”

The service is an evolution of an earlier radio-search feature that Robertson developed, which both scrapes music lists from the web and uses a combination of APIs and other technical methods to generate its database. It started as an offshoot of a separate service he created called DAR.fm, which allows users to record radio programming the way a PVR lets TV watchers record their favorite TV shows.

“We had to build a guide of stations and play schedules for DAR.fm,” Robertson told Fortune in an interview before the launch. “So I thought, if I’m indexing talk radio stations, why not index music stations as well. So we came up with a way to index all online radio stations in real time. Radio is awesome, but it has a huge discovery problem. We want to fix it by giving every song a unique URL.”

OnRadio doesn’t have to worry about breaching any copyright rules because when a user clicks on a song, they are taken directly to the radio station that is playing the song—the service doesn’t make a copy or stream the music itself. Robertson said radio stations are likely to be happy with the search feature because it will increase traffic to their sites, where users can also see and listen to ads.

Not surprisingly, the lawsuit against Mp3.com came up during our interview, and Robertson said he was interested to see Google win a lawsuit by the Authors Guild related to the company’s book-scanning project. Even though it involved scanning and indexing millions of copyrighted books, the court ruled that the public benefit of the service outweighed the copyright concerns.

One of the key targets of the Mp3.com lawsuit was a feature that allowed users to match their existing CDs against the company’s database, and listen to any of their legally acquired songs from the cloud service without having to upload them. The company digitized millions of CDs to populate this library, and the major record labels said that behavior represented massive copyright infringement.

Would Mp3.com still be found guilty now, given the ruling in the Google lawsuit? That’s hard to say, but there seem to be a lot of similarities between the two.

Robertson said that the legal challenge still bothers him, primarily because the judge said that he was an “internet scofflaw” who believed the law didn’t apply to him. “I think that was unfair,” the Mp3.com founder said. “Look at what Google did—maybe they did infringe, but they were within the spirit of copyright law, which is supposed to benefit society. So was Mp3.com. I guess that’s what you get when you go first.”
http://fortune.com/2015/11/24/mp3-com-founder/





Adele’s ‘25’ Sells Record-Shattering 3.38 Million Copies
Joe Coscarelli

The final numbers are in, and they confirm expectations: Adele is a phenomenon.

Billboard reports that the singer’s new album, “25” (XL/Columbia), sold a record-shattering 3.38 million copies in the United States through its first week, according to Nielsen Music. That’s nearly a million more than the previous high mark for first-week sales — ’N Sync sold 2.4 million copies of “No Strings Attached” in 2000 — and makes “25” the first release to sell three million copies in a week since Nielsen (and previously SoundScan) began tallying hard sales data in 1991.

Adele’s coup comes in a climate far less hospitable to blockbusters: At the turn of the millennium, retailers were selling about 700 million CDs a year, while last year just 247 million albums were sold in CDs and downloads combined, according to Nielsen. (Sales of “25” are expected to be split about evenly between digital and hard copy.) Only 20 albums have ever sold more than a million copies in a week.

Its opening puts “25” easily atop the Billboard 200 and makes it the best-selling album of 2015 so far, besting Taylor Swift’s “1989,” which was released in 2014 and has sold nearly 2 million albums this year. One thing the albums have in common is that the artists chose not to stream them on Spotify, favoring potential sales over free streams and probably contributing to their monster numbers.

The industry-shaking release rollout — which included an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” and a promotional partnership with Target, the biggest retailer for physical “25” sales — comes after a period of public silence following Adele’s previous album, “21.” That album has sold some 30 million copies — 11.2 million in the United States — since 2011, but Adele, 27, has avoided steady appearances in the press and on social media.

Her public, however, proved patient, loyal and willing to spend. (Nielsen has said the typical Adele fan is a college-educated woman aged 25 to 44, according to its demographics research.) The album’s first single, “Hello,” which was released on Oct. 23 and made available on streaming services, immediately shot to No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart and has not budged since. “Hello” became the first track to sell more than 1 million downloads in a week, nearly doubling the previous record of 636,000, held by Flo Rida’s “Right Round.”

For “25,” which in addition to Adele’s trademark heartbreak ballads includes weary meditations on aging, it took just over three days of the sales week to surpass ’N Sync’s record.

One question remaining is whether Adele can top herself: “21” spent 24 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard chart. “25” is just getting comfortable there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/ar...on-copies.html





How a Kid Running an Obscure Music Forum Became the Target Of the UK's Biggest Ever Piracy Case
Joe Zadeh

It’s 5pm on a Friday and Kane Robinson is sat in his parents home in North Shields, a fishing town on the North bank of the River Tyne in the North East of England. He's patiently watching the new Call of Duty slowly download - legally of course. His young niece runs into the room wearing her brownies uniform and he takes the mick out of her for a few minutes. Last week, Kane was released from Kirklevington Grange prison, and now he’s on tag, with a curfew of 7pm to 7am. Home is where it’s at right now, by necessity.

The first time I saw Kane's name was on the front page of the newspapers. A 23 year old male had been arrested as the brains behind a music forum called Dancing Jesus, and would be facing court imminently. A year passed, until I saw his name again, this time on the Daily Mail online, and with a lot more criminal gravitas attached. He was now described as “an internet pirate who set up music sharing website that cost industry £240million.” He had been sentenced to 32 months in prison; the longest prison sentence ever given to an internet music piracy case in the UK.

The prosecution, brought forth by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), made the case that Kane Robinson was one of the most damaging and ruthless music copyright infringement operations the UK had ever seen. The heavy sentence not only put Kane behind bars, it painted him as a monumental villain of the digital era; the bane of the music industry, or as the newspapers called him: “a cyber crook”.

I talked with Kane while he was in prison, via the robust interface of EmailaPrisoner.com. My emails would be printed off and slipped under his cell door, and he would post me replies a few weeks later. But whether by mistake, or by some sort of third party interference, a lot of my most pertinent questions about his case would be missed off in replies, despite Kane insisting he answered everything he received. Eventually, we agreed to wait until he was free from prison, and we finally talked face to face just five days after his release.

For a few thousand people, the Dancing Jesus music forum will wreak nostalgia for a time period when you deeply considered buying a Libertines jacket and were proud to know every word to Bloc Party’s “Banquet”. For those unaware, it was a no fuss music message board of around 12,000 users operational between 2006 and 2011. Fans of mostly British indie music would gather to discuss albums, rate gigs, share mixtapes, swap MegaUpload, Mediafire, or Rapidshare links to new and unreleased music, and explain to each other how the hell to use WinRAR.

These days, music forums are less central to the way music is disseminated, with KanyeToThe.com a notable survivor and specialist Reddit music boards picking up all in-between. But in the mid-noughties, forums were hot, and places like Dancing Jesus thrived. This particular message board had its own character: an intellectualised, passionate and kinda pretentious identity to rival that of Pitchfork or Drowned in Sound at the time. It would house seething arguments (was nu rave bullshit? were The Automatic enemies of taste?) and spark hundreds of friendships - even going IRL at times on threads for lone gig-goers to find themselves a willing +1. To me and my friends it felt immeasurably wise, and way cooler than us in our pin-badge blazers and New Look jeans. We safely assumed it was set up by some sort of East London dark web indie libertarian with seventeen disk burners, four monitors, and a black book of crooked industry contacts.

But the bossman behind the entire operation was a young lad living with his parents in the North East of England, just using the home iMac in his bedroom between college and a part time job pushing trolleys at his local Tesco. “It always makes me laugh when people emphasised in the news stories about me that I’d ran this whole thing from a bedroom on the North East coast,” says Kane. “Where else am I gonna run a fucking website from like? You make a website at home!” And the more I talked with Kane and investigated his story, the less I found the nefarious, industry destroying, £240million plundering, criminal mastermind I’d been led to expect, and the more I become acquainted with a slightly naive and over-enthusiastic music fan who made silly mistakes at a very serious time.

When Kane was a kid, a friend’s older brother from the house across the road opened his eyes to the blurrier edges of the web – namely the surreal weirdness of stuff like SteakandCheese.com. Kane was hooked. By 12, he was making websites on Geocities: Jackass fan websites, football websites, and wrestling websites – “a lot of wrestling websites” – before becoming totally enamoured with doing fansites about his love for The Simpsons.

At school, a 14 year old Kane made his own custom website, undetected by school firewalls, and hosted all the flash games his IT teachers had blocked. “I shared the link around the school and put a daft guestbook up there too,” he says. “The whole school would go on, play, chat to each other, leave messages - stir a lotta shit basically.”

He left school at 16, with his enthusiasm for computing at a high, and enrolled for a BTEC in IT at Tyne Metropolitan College. It was late 2005, and a new wave of indie rock was vibrating beneath the winklepickers of British indie kids. The NME’s Essential Bands box set featured Razorlight, Bloc Party, Maximo Park and the Futureheads and was something people genuinely got excited for; Oasis were charting successive number ones with “Lyla” and “The Importance of Being Idle”; and Beneath the Boardwalk, a fan-made collection of 18 demos (including “Scummy” and “Cigarette Smoker Fiona”) by hype Sheffield band the Arctic Monkeys, was redefining the positives of peer-to-peer filesharing in a post-Napster world – its digital snowballing would be instrumental in sending their first official single, “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”, straight to number one. “When they turned up, it was like nothing I’d heard before,” says Kane. “It felt like they were painting a picture of our life. We’d download whatever we could get off Limewire.”

He set about making an Arctic Monkeys fansite with his friend (“he’s a bit more technical than me, I’m more ideas”) called Mardy-Bum.com. He filled it with news, rumours, demos and rips. It garnered a passionate following very quickly, and Kane got the bug for making something people actually wanted.

The Arctic Monkeys were a unique concoction, in that they were unmistakably blasé about their early music being horsed out by fans – “We never made those demos to make money anyway,” drummer Matt Helders told Prefix Magazine in 2005. Mardy-Bum.com became so popular that websites like NME.com started to use it as a news source, and lads magazine Zoo gave it a spread feature. Kane read the Zoo feature straight from the shelf of the Tesco he worked in.

Eventually Geoff Barradale, who still manages the band to this day, gave Kane a call. “He loved the romance of our site,” he explains. “He said the current website manager wasn’t doing the best job, and how would we like to run it. If you’d asked me at the time: ‘What would be your dream job?’ It would be managing the Arctic Monkeys’ website. Now, here’s someone ringing me at college and offering me it. I was only 20 at the time.” He was called down to Sheffield for a meeting, and found himself in their management office. When Barradale popped out the room to get something, Kane quickly got his friend to take a photo on his phone of him holding the Arctic Monkey’s recent Q Award for 'Best Act in the World Today'.

Splitting his time between the Arctic Monkeys and his job in Tesco, Kane was also nursing online side projects. He'd noticed loads of band forums which were rocketing in members amidst an endless tide of British indie music. The Cribs had a particularly buzzing forum, as did many others, and the “Off Topic” sections often became a haven for rampant peer-to-peer music sharing. “It was happening everywhere on different forums,” explains Kane, “but nowhere was dedicated to it. I wanted to put it in one place.”

He acquired a proper paid server – the only one he could afford was £50/month and just so happened to be in Dallas. Then he rented some webspace and created a forum: a minimal design that was basic to look at and easy to use. Early on, he promised users there would never be any advertising on the forum, that he would make no money from it, and the bill would always be footed by Kane alone. He already had a job; he just wanted this to be a hobby.

He made two rooms – one for music and an off-topic one called The Lounge – and avoided excessive sub-topic threads. And, of course, he gave it a name; inspired by The Simpsons episode, ‘The Computer Wore Menace Shoes’ - the one where Homer visits a website on his new PC which simply shows Jesus Christ disco jiving in front of a blue background. Just like that, in mid-2006, Dancing Jesus was born. Finally, Kane nabbed a picture from the only other actual Dancing Jesus website currently in Google search results - an online store for novelty bobble heads - and made their product image his forum logo. Then he chose his username: Jesus.

“I never fucking liked the word ‘Admin’,” he laughs, when I ask him what his online username was on the forums. “I called myself Jesus. Because I was the boss, wasn’t I? I was in charge of it all."

He started out by just telling his mates about it. "I was saying, ‘Look, I’ve set up a forum here, if you wanna share music then come to me because I’ve bought a server so I won’t get shut down as quick as these other websites.’ To start with, there was nothing making people come back, so, yeah, I would go get links from big torrent sites like Oink’s Pink Palace. Because, these were the places where the music did actually leak first. No music ever leaked first on Dancing Jesus, we were just a message board.”

Dancing Jesus never actually hosted any illegal files. It didn't have the means to. It was simply a forum. Users would find files or links elsewhere, and use the forum as a place to share and discuss them. If MegaUpload or Pirate Bay were kalashnikov guarded Colombian cocaine meccas, then Dancing Jesus forum was a dead end British nightclub one thousand miles away, with a small crowd of regulars and a handful of part time dealers - and Kane was the owner. Yes, he was breaking the law - guilty of what is called 'authorising copyright infringement' - but he was so far down the food chain, it was barely worth thinking about.

He’d heard that one of the users on Dancing Jesus was perhaps getting some leaks direct – ”through a contact who used to be a writer for Kerrang back in the day” – but even that was just a rumour. He noticed a user named Trix, a married woman according to her forum profile, building a reputation for always posting quite high quality copies on the forum, but nobody really questioned where they came from.

During its golden years, Dancing Jesus epitomised a unique time in British music. It felt like there was a hype new band every fortnight, and the concept of physical release dates was getting battered by the immediacy demands of the internet and its consumers. Leaked records and file sharing became pretty much the norm amongst youngsters. Internet service providers had not yet started to crackdown on suspect websites, 28% of Britons admitted to downloading copyright material without paying for it, and 80% admitted they desired a legal form of P2P file sharing going forward. For tech-savvy music fans, it was like the roaring twenties; for label owners, it was like the Great Depression.

But in this peer-to-peer sharing storm, new music prospered. Acts like Patrick Wolf, Foals, Hadouken!, Little Man Tate, Bombay Bicycle Club, Klaxons, Bromheads Jacket, Maximo Park, the Futureheads, Cooper Temple Clause, Forward Russia, and The Sunshine Underground, were staple names on the Dancing Jesus forum. And the Arctic Monkeys obviously. Nu rave came and went, certain electronic artists (Burial, Aphex Twin, Four Tet) were championed, and there was also a distinctive taste for more experimental American indie; established acts like Neutral Milk Hotel or Modest Mouse would be dissected and debated regularly. Fanmade end of year compilations became a ritual, and I’ll admit my first ever experience of Burial was the sound of “Archangel” sandwiched quite nobly between “The Photos on My Wall” by Good Shoes and a long-forgotten Towers of London track, on an unofficial Dancing Jesus mixtape. But it was still a niche prospect - in all the years it was active, the site never topped 12,000 users at any given time.

“It got popular, but I was still dead against making money off it,” says Kane. “I had no desire to, and I knew that would just get me into trouble. So, I had no adverts, and I paid for it all myself. I got pleasure from seeing the community grow. People were sharing music with each other, sharing recommendations - just being mates online really. I do suspect some relationships even started on there.”

As admins and mods took on the little work there was to do, Kane paid less and less attention to the small but fervent community he had began. Things were changing in real life, and he focused on his university studies. He pursued more work in website design, travelling to London after being approached as a digital producer for NME.com. He’d hear his friends talk about Dancing Jesus, but he never mentioned his involvement. Although Kane, perhaps naively, made no attempts to protect his real identity online. “If people wanted to know who I was, they could find out, and they did. Users would find my Myspace and post pictures of me on the forum - I wasn’t bothered. I never made insurances to hide from the police though, because I never really believed there was any danger.”

Kane didn’t see himself as a cyber criminal. He wasn’t part of some dark cabal exchanging links on encrypted messenger services, gleaning leaks straight from CD pressing plants, or sending ship loads of pirate copies to China. He’d never heard of the warez scene and he didn’t use the darknet. He was just a reasonably tech-savvy indie fan with a little forum, who dabbled in a bit of file sharing. Didn’t everyone?

His feeling of innocence was probably what blinded him from seeing the hurricane that was beginning to gather at sea. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic were beginning to invest more manpower than ever into internet piracy cases. In 2010, Alan Ellis, the founder of Oink’s Pink Palace, the prominent BitTorrent tracker Kane had himself used in the past (and coincidentally also from the North East of England), became the first person in the UK to be prosecuted for illegal file sharing. While the arrest grabbed headlines, the punishment did not. Some users were given community service and fines of £500, but Ellis himself was found not guilty, thanks to the defence work of hotshot cybercrime solicitor David Cook and the prosecution's regretful decision to pursue him for fraud rather than copyright infringement.

There were other warnings though. New users would spring up on Dancing Jesus, writing that they had been driven there because all their usual hangouts had been closed down and prosecuted. But Kane was unperturbed. "We’d been going for years by now, and purposefully made no money. I was sure that if anyone was annoyed with what I was doing, I would hear from them. I was never told to shut Dancing Jesus down." (I contacted the BPI Copyright Protection Unit to ask if they ever issued Dancing Jesus with a takedown request. They declined to comment.)

Then, on September 1st 2011, there was a hard knock at the front door. “Just three weeks earlier, I had been to London for that interview with NME.com. I’m lying in bed, it’s about 6am in the morning. Me mam comes into my bedroom. She says, ‘Kane, the police are here.’" As he walked down the stairs, he heard London voices, and in his sleepy haze assumed illogically that he’d skipped a fare on the tube after his job interview. But there were six officers in the house, two of them from City of London, two from his local police station, and two from an investigative unit of the music industry. And when the latter two introduced themselves, Kane realised what was coming.

They went into his room with a view to seizing evidence. “I think they expected some piracy operation, but all they found was my laptop blaring fucking It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. That probably didn’t help things actually. The first thing they saw when they opened my computer was two full season torrents of that and Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Kane was arrested. He was 22 at the time.

Despite the drama of the arrest, the gravity of Kane’s situation didn’t really hit him, nor his parents, friends, or even the officers involved in his case. One of the London officers muttered to him that, “It might seem a serious matter, but you’ll probably be alright.” And when Kane arrived at Gateshead Police Station, he was greeted with the chirpy sound of a local officer: “Eee! We’ve never had anyone in for this before!”

In his first interview, he accepted all of the blame for the website and rejected opportunities to put any of it onto moderators or forum admins. He was released on bail and surprisingly told that Dancing Jesus, which had been taken down by authorities, could be set online again if he wished, as long as he ensured no download links were hosted on there anymore. Apart from that, the only other thing they wanted to know: who was Trix? Kane had no idea. He rebooted the forum, told the users what had happened, and banned the posting of links.

Then his case went cold. Attempts to answer bail were repeatedly cancelled by the authorities, and in June 2012, almost a year after his arrest, he was given strange news. ”I rang to ask if he wanted me to come down on the train to answer my bail and they said, ‘No, don’t come down. You’re officially not on police bail anymore’.” Kane told his friends and family and the assumption was that he had been excused, albeit mysteriously.

It wasn’t until he appealed to get his seized possessions back, that the next, more fateful chapter began. Kane was being privately prosecuted by the BPI (British Phonographic Industry), and, from there, things gradually fell apart. His cheap Dallas server had been seized by US Homeland Security, landing Kane in the crosshairs of the world’s most vociferous piracy hunters, and making his case one of the first copyright infringement cases in which US and UK authorities had worked together. Kane started to get a feeling in the back of his mind that this could be getting bigger than he first thought. The BPI were prosecuting him, and it was a big deal. It was time to get some legal aid.

Months passed. The NME job fell through, Dancing Jesus was taken down permanently, and at the age when most twenty-somethings would be looking to leave home, Kane was struggling to make any plans further than the month ahead. It wasn’t until October 2013, almost two and a half years since his arrest, that Kane was summoned to Newcastle Crown Court.

Arriving in the docks that day, Kane saw prolific forum user Trix for the first time. She wasn’t a married woman, but a 22-year-old man from Leicestershire called Richard. Kane pleaded guilty to his charge of copyright infringement. He was not called back for sentencing for another year.

“Those whole 3 years from arrest to sentencing, people were asking me what’s happening? Are you gonna get jail? Maybe. I’ve no idea. Nobody knew. There were no sentence guidelines for a case like mine. Everybody around me thought I’d get a slap on the wrist, and maybe a big fine. But deep down I knew something was afoot. I knew the music industry wanted to make a big example of me.”

To understand Kane's case, you need to look at the mood surrounding it. The high profile failure to prosecute Oink’s Pink Palace and ongoing international case of Kim Dotcom and his expensive defence team, left bad tastes in the mouths of the music industry. These cases portrayed a message that online piracy prosecutions, as opposed to often punished CD bootleggers, could be dodged and wormed out of if you played your cards right and forked out for a good legal team. The BPI had spent the summer of 2014 fighting Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other search engines to start pushing illegal file sharing sites down their rankings, to little success. Hundreds of cases launched by the BPI throughout the 2000s had resulted in nothing more than fines (the most of around £5,000) and suing. But since suing only really works if the perpetrator has enough money to pay up, it wasn't exactly a deterrent. Prison sentences are a deterrent.

In the US, big piracy prison sentences were being handed out, but the UK felt like a more lenient landscape. You could pontificate then, that the time was right for a scapegoat; a severe case fit for mass scaremongering; a hardline success for the BPI Copyright Protection Unit that could become a piracy horror story for years to come. You can imagine that Kane Robinson, hardly an internet tycoon, with just a legal aid defence, no piracy profits to fund court proceedings, and no cyber crime specialist in sight, looked like quite the sitting duck.

“The weekend before sentencing, I sat down with my barrister, and he read out that they would be accusing me of pirating 46 of the top 50 singles from 2010/11. I gave him my rebuttal to that. But then, on the day of sentencing, this £240million figure suddenly sprung out of the air. And that ended up being what my entire sentence ended up based on. I don’t know if my legal aid team were outgunned, or the prosecution slipped that in at the last minute, but it felt like everyone in that courtroom had agreed that I was to be punished.”

On November 10th 2014, despite having no prior criminal convictions, Kane was sentenced to 32 months in prison. Richard Graham, aka Trix, was given a shorter sentence of 21 months. Kane's face was plastered over the front of local and national newspapers. The picture of him holding the Arctic Monkeys’ Q Award leaked to the press. Ironically, most cropped out the award and no reporters pondered why exactly Kane would be holding it. Any legitimacy was of no interest, he was a cyber crook.

The Daily Mail painted his forum like some sort of grandiose Gatsby mansion of pre-release debauchery, writing on Nov 11th 2014 that Dancing Jesus had "70 million users" (more than Apple Music and Spotify put together, if only it were true) who could "listen to almost any song or album after its release date." The director of BPI's Copyright Protection Unit, David Wood, released a statement: "Today’s sentencing sends a clear message to the operators and users of illegal music sites that online piracy is a criminal activity that will not be tolerated by law enforcement in the UK or overseas." Elsewhere, the sentence was described as “pretty severe” and the kind “you would more commonly find in criminal copyright convictions relating to the manufacture and sale of bootlegged CDs or DVDs.”

The severity of Kane's sentence is a sticking point. One can cast a comparative eye to the case of American citizen Bennie Lydell Glover, a former factory worker at a Universal Music CD pressing plant who pirated and leaked hundreds of the biggest albums in the world over a ten year period, operating as the key supplier to the infamous warez group Rabid Neurosis, selling physical pirate copies to numerous clients in and around the New York area, and described recently by the New York Times as "the man who broke the music industry". In 2010, Glover received three months in prison.

The £240million tag calculated by the BPI was the fatal blow, and it’s a little difficult to figure out where it came from. How did Kane end up costing the music industry a sum so astronomical with a forum of just 12,000 users? When compared with other piracy cases, it appears almost whimsical. It’s £236million more than Pirate Bay co-founder Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij was ordered to pay in damages. Kim Dotcom, the millionaire internet magnate responsible for the infamous MegaUpload.com, is only responsible for damages of £100million more than Kane according to his prosecution. That’s despite MegaUpload.com being responsible for hosting and distributing 12 billions links, compared to the 22,500 links that were only posted by users on Dancing Jesus and not hosted.

“The case for authorising infringement is quite straightforward,” explains music law specialist Chris Cooke of Complete Music Update, “and the fact he didn’t host the content is not relevant. But why the court thought it was a criminal matter for prosecution is another thing. If Kane was making no money, then you have to assume that they have taken issue with the sheer size of his operation.”

The sheer size of the operation was measured in this mythical £240million figure. While Kane was inside, his family and friends set up a crowdfunder to raise money to pay for the legal advice of cyber crime lawyer David Cook, who had successfully defended Oink in the past. Where Kane’s legal aid team had failed, Cook whittled the damages down staggeringly to approximately £500,000. (I contacted the BPI Copyright Protection Unit to request information about how they originally calculated that £240 million total, but they declined to comment, as they did on every question I put to them about this piece. However, it should be noted that this is standard protocol for cases where the defendant pleaded guilty.)

“These cyber laws are just a huge grey area,” explains Kane. “That’s how people like David Cook are experts at getting people off. Because we’re at a time where these lawyers know more about the digital laws than the courts do. If you can get the right representation and afford it, then you can get fairer trials for these digital crimes. But if you find yourself with legal aid, going against an entire music industry and a judge that’s new to these types of crimes, then, well, you’re fucked.”

Kane’s case came at a point when the bullish determination of the BPI to prosecute music piracy cases with prison was high, but the knowledge and experience of courts, judges, juries and especially legal aid teams to understand the genuine complexities of it was still nascent. He became the low hanging fruit of a crime industry that, in reality, operates on a far grander scale way, way above his head. This is a problem, and one that is only amplifying.

In the US, a 23 year old has just been sentenced to 3 years in federal prison for a music piracy case estimating $7million in value, and in the UK, in July this year, the Conservative government launched an official consultation on plans to increase the maximum prison sentence for British online music pirates five fold, from two years to a brutal ten years. They counter that this would only be for criminals guilty of “commercial-scale online copyright infringement.” The idea is that this level of punishment brings online music piracy sentencing up to the level at which offline piracy offenders, like CD bootleggers, are punished.

However, there are huge chasms between the criminality of a CD bootlegging enterprise and a kid running a forum online. Starting a CD bootlegging enterprise is not easy, whereas starting a website is. In CD bootleg cases, it’s often quite easy to see how much the perpetrator made and how much they cost the music industry, because physical sales result in costs and profits that are traceable through bank accounts. But in online music piracy cases, these figures put next to offenders names are usually exaggerated estimations, based on how many people probably downloaded something and how many purchases they probably didn’t make as a result, and what this therefore probably cost the industry. That’s how you get huge estimations like £240million, plucked from the air. It’s very murky ground to equate offline and online music piracy crimes for prison sentence lengths.

The case of Kane Robinson exemplified how racking up “commercial scale” figures next to bedroom dwelling music fans with no prior convictions, is an easy and unchallenged task for BPI prosecutors operating in a UK courts system that is clearly still learning the nuances and intricacies of this cyber crime world. Sentences like Kane’s are threatening to become not only more common, but even more lifechanging. As digital copyright infringement becomes one of the 21st century’s most era-defining crimes, it’s increasingly dangerous that most people still don’t understand how the hell it works. But instead of devising a way to educate people from a young age about the dangers, ethics and consequences of music piracy, both for themselves and the artists (a problem independent anti-piracy company Muso are trying to tackle), the British government and the BPI are fixated on channeling all their efforts towards increasingly brutal sentences.

In jail, the confusion amongst the authorities on quite how to handle Kane continued. He spent six days in a local remand jail in Durham, before being transferred to Northumberland for six months. “I was recategorised for good behaviour and granted to go to an open jail in Kirklevington, which was a lot more relaxed. But when I got there, it transpired I apparently could have been there to start with.” He recalls fellow inmates almost laughing at his crime: “How the fuck are you in here for downloading music?” Where most prisoners are given a sentence plan relating to their crime - to reduce the risk of reoffending and support resettlement - Kane was ignored: “For example, if you’re in for something violent, you get a thinking skills course program or something. But I never once met with my sentence manager to discuss any of that. They just didn’t have a clue what to do with me.”

He’s angered by the injustices of his story, but he also manages to be good-humoured about much of it. "You meet some of the worst people in the world in prison," he says, "but you also meet some of the best. I learned more there than at three years of uni." And though he’s deeply annoyed at the way the press covered his story, he can still snigger at how a picture he took as a joke of him posing as David Brent on a sofa, ended up on so many front pages, in such grossly pixelated form.

Now back home in North Shields, he's found some little bits of work designing websites for friends of friends. But mostly, he’s just re-adjusting to being free again. Prison was a “weird dream”, and he wants to focus on getting his life back on track. For the first time in four years he can think about something other than his prosecution, starting with how he’s going to keep himself occupied for the next eight months of this 7pm to 7am curfew. At least Call of Duty has finally finished downloading.
https://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/blog/t...try-240million





After Illegally Censoring Websites For Five Years On Bogus Copyright Charges, US Gov't Quietly 'Returns' Two Domains
Mike Masnick

One of the craziest stories of outright censorship by the US government isn't getting any attention at all. Five years ago, ICE -- Immigrations and Customs Enforcement -- a part of the Department of Homeland Security, illegally seized a group of domain names, claiming that they were violating copyright law. As we noted soon after this, the affidavit that ICE used to get a court to sign off on the seizures was particularly ridiculous, showing a near total lack of understanding of both the law and how the internet worked.

The owner of one of the domains, Waleed Gad El Kareem, announced quickly that he was going to fight the seizure -- and he did. Of course, you might not have heard much about it because Homeland Security and ICE basically ignored his legal effort to contest the seizure... until just a few days ago when the domain was "returned" (more on that in a bit). You may also recall that ICE defended these seizures by stating that "no one" had challenged any of the seizures. We called bullshit on this, noting that the owners of five of the seized domains had, in fact, challenged the seizures. Four years ago, we wrote about how the government sheepishly returned Dajaz1, a hip hop music blog, that it had seized and censored for over a year. That story was fairly crazy, as it only did so after Dajaz1 filed a claim demanding the return of the site. The Justice Department secretly (without even telling Dajaz1's lawyer) kept delaying the required response to such a demand, until finally giving up and giving back the domain. It was later revealed that the "reason" ICE secretly delayed returning the domain was that it kept asking the RIAA for the evidence that Dajaz1 had violated the law (as an RIAA rep had initially sworn to an ICE agent), but the RIAA never provided anything.

The following summer, the government returned two more domains. In that case, the company that owned the domains rojadirecta.org and rojadirecta.com, Puerto 80, had actually taken a different path than the others. It flat out sued the government. The government then turned around and initiated a separate legal process to permanently "forfeit" the domains, leading to a bizarre series of filings -- and then, magically, the government just gave up and handed the domains back.

As we noted at the time, that still left a couple of other domains, including torrent-finder.com and onsmash.com. This was all the way back in Decmeber of 2011 -- four years ago -- when we noted both were unaccounted for. Over those four years, I've periodically checked in with the lawyers for both sites, and basically kept getting told there was no update at all, and that they had tried to talk ICE into returning the domains, but ICE basically stopped returning their calls. From what I can gather, neither of the operators of those sites wanted to take the route of Dajaz1 or Rojadirecta, which involved actually going to court, as that's an expensive proposition.

But, it appears that last week, five years after the government just seized those domains, they were supposedly turned back over to the owners.

Well, sort of. Having spoken to Waleed about torrent-finder.com, he told me that ICE had promised to renew the domains when payment ran out -- but it did not do so. Waleed actually feared that might be an issue, and had to re-grab the "expired" domain out of exemption, after ICE released its hold on it. I have not yet been able to confirm what happened with OnSmash.com, but we've been told that ICE similarly released its hold on that domain the same day as it released Torrent-finder.

Still, think about this for a second: The US government illegally seized and censored, on no legal basis a series of websites for five whole years. Dajaz1 and OnSmash were blogs -- so it was akin to seizing the printing presses of magazines (clear prior restraint that is unconstitutional). Torrent-finder is a search engine, like Google or Bing, but specialized in torrent files. Yes, many torrent files may link to infringing content, but many do not, and a search engine should never be completely seized, without any real due process, just because it finds content that may break the law.

This is a complete travesty, and the US government completely got away with it too, because the websites it seized were generally held by individuals without much money, or not even in the US (as is the case with Waleed). I've filed a FOIA request with ICE to try to find out more information on this, but considering all of the grandstanding ICE did when it seized these websites, the fact that it's now basically returned every one of the domains who challenged the seizure really says something -- and it's not good for ICE. Hell, check out this ridiculous MSNBC "investigation" that quotes the ICE guy in charge of these efforts, William Ross, saying completely nonsensical things, like: "We're protecting them from other people taking their ideas and selling them." How do you sell someone else's ideas? Also, none of these sites involved selling anything.

Ross is also quoted in the piece saying: "We keep going after them, no matter how many times they come back up." And yet now ICE has admitted that Ross not only totally fucked up in stealing these domains from their legitimate owners, it then illegally held them for five years. You'd think that, at the very least, Ross and the US government owe Waleed and the others an apology. But I wouldn't expect that any time soon.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...-domains.shtml





The Attack that Broke the Dark Web—and How Tor Plans to Fix it
Kashmir Hill

Law enforcement has been complaining for years about the Web “going dark,” saying that encryption and privacy tools are frustrating their ability to track criminals online. But massive FBI operations over the last year that have busted ‘hidden sites’ used for the sale of drugs, hacking tools, and child pornography suggest the digital criminal world has gotten lighter, with law enforcement bragging that criminals can’t “hide in the shadows of the Dark Web anymore.” While mysterious about its tactics, law enforcement indicated that it had found a way to circumvent the tool on which these sites relied, a software called Tor. But criminals are not the only ones who rely on it.

Tor, or The Onion Router, is a browser that lets people use the Internet without being tracked and access hidden sites, as well as a software project that supports the ‘Dark Web,’ allowing websites (or “hidden services”) to be hosted in such a way that their location is impossible to determine. Last year, Tor suffered a large-scale attack that compromised the anonymity of its users over a period of at least six months. The attack was launched by academic researchers affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University whose motives remain murky because they now refuse to talk about it. In subsequent prosecutions of people who used Tor hidden services for criminal purposes, government lawyers have said evidence came from a “university-based research institute,” meaning that the academic exploration of the anonymity tool’s vulnerabilities may send some Tor users to prison.

A review of emails sent on Tor’s public list-serv reveals that Tor saw the attack coming, but failed to stop it. It raises questions about Tor’s ability to maintain the privacy of the 2 million people who use it every day—most of them activists, human rights workers, journalists, and security-minded computer users, not criminals—as well as how far academic researchers and law enforcement should go to undermine the privacy protections people seek online.

In a phone interview last week, Tor chief architect Nick Mathewson explained for the first time exactly what happened and what Tor is doing to try to ensure it never happens again.

In February 2014, Sebastian “bastik” G.—a Tor supporter who contributes to the maintenance of the anonymity network Tor in his free time—noticed something amiss with the backbone of the Dark Web.

Tor depends on a world-wide network of computers that mask users’ identities by encrypting their activity and bouncing it through a bunch of different stops on the way to its final destination; it’s like 100 people whispering secrets in gibberish to each other during a huge game of Telephone, so that it’s hard for an outsider to tell where a message started or where it ends. Tor relies on thousands of volunteers to run the servers that power the network, sometimes at great personal risk. Bastik saw that an internal monitoring program called “DocTor,” which scans the network for “hiccups,” was reporting that a ton of new computers from the same IP address were rapidly joining the network as new relay points.

Bastik sent an alarmed email to the Tor mailing list saying that it looked like someone was launching an attack: if a single party controls enough relay points, it could undo the anonymity of the network. It’s a phenomenon called a Sybil attack, named after a book about a woman with multiple personalities. It’s as if in that giant game of Telephone above, 40 of the 100 people were actually one person, making it more likely they’d figure out you were the one who told a terrible secret.

A Tor developer responded dismissively, saying he would loop back in a week and that Tor wasn’t overly concerned because they weren’t exit relays, which are the last stop in the game of whispers. Tor decided the relays didn’t pose a risk and ultimately did nothing to block them, a terrible mistake when it came to protecting the privacy of its users.

“I don’t think this is the best response we’ve ever done to an attack situation,” said Mathewson by phone.

Five months later, Michael McCord and Alexander Volynkin, two researchers at Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon, announced that they had “broken” Tor, and discovered a way to identify hundred of thousands of users and find the true locations of thousands of ‘hidden’ websites.

“We know because we tested it, in the wild,” they bragged in the abstract for a security conference talk that was canceled shortly after it was announced. A Carnegie Mellon attorney told the Black Hat conference organizers that the talk relied on materials the university hadn’t approved for public release. The researchers refused to comment, saying questions should be directed to Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute [SEI], the Department of Defense-funded center at which they were employed. The university refused to answer further questions about the project, or to say whether the information gathered was shared with law enforcement.

“We are not able to comment on Tor,” said SEI spokesperson Richard Lynch in an email this week.

But the answer seemed clear when, four months later, in November 2014, the FBI announced Operation Onymous (as in no longer Anonymous)—a global crackdown on the Dark Web, that included the seizure of hidden websites and the arrest of dozens of Tor users involved in online drug markets. (Recent court documents citing a “university-based research institute” support the link.) And this year, in July, the crackdown continued with Operation Shrouded Horizon, in which a site for cyber-criminals called Darkode, which was hosted on Tor hidden services, was dismantled and hundreds around the world were arrested. The FBI said in the press release that the global case was led by its field office in Pittsburgh, where Carnegie Mellon is based. The FBI would not comment this week on whether Carnegie Mellon’s research had been used in its operations.

Mathewson and Tor founder Roger Dingledine, who met at MIT, have spent the last decade building up and maintaining Tor, which was originally a Naval Research Lab project to protect government communications. Eighty percent of its $2.5 million budget still comes from governments, including funding from the U.S. Defense Department and the U.S. State Department. For as much as the Dark Web relies on Tor, it’s a rinky-dink operation. There are 22 full- and part-time paid employees dispersed around the world and about 50 volunteers and academics who contribute time and code (just 10 of them solidly dedicated to it currently, said Mathewson). Tor depends on academic researchers to identify ways to improve the technology and shore up vulnerabilities, so it regularly sees people running experiments on the network, most of which become papers like these.

“It’s fairly normal for researchers to do benign but shifty looking activities,” said Mathewson. “Activity in the past has looked suspicious at the time, but ultimately did stuff that helped advance our art.”

The publication of the Black Hat schedule online in May 2014 was the first notice Tor got about what Carnegie Mellon had been up to. Tor reached out to the CMU researchers Volynkin and McCord but were told they couldn’t say more because of “institutional confidentiality issues.”

As the summer progressed, Tor slowly began realizing just how devastating the CMU project was. On June 12, 2014, someone from the Black Hat program committee sent Mathewson a copy of the researchers’ paper, alarmed that the attack, which involved injecting signals into Tor protocol headers, might be actively affecting Tor. After reading the paper, Mathewson began working on a countermeasure.

“It didn’t occur to me that they would run the attack in the wild on random users,” said Mathewson. “The way the attack was structured, it was a bad attack for anyone to get away with it. Once detected, it was very easy to block. It didn’t seem to me like a deep threat.”

On June 23, 2014, Mathewson says the researchers sent Tor an email that described their attack, but with fewer details than were in the paper, omissions that would have made the attack harder to block.

Two weeks later, on July 4, Mathewson was in Paris for a Tor developers’ meeting, an event that happens twice a year so that Tor’s far-flung network of contributors and volunteers can meet each other and discuss pressing issues. More than fifty people gathered at Mozilla’s offices in the center of Paris. It was productive but exhausting, a week of intense conversation, coding, and late nights with Internet friends rarely seen in person. On the last night of the week, Mathewson got back to his hotel room late and began running a test of his defense code to see if his countermeasure would work.

“Around 1 or 2 a.m., I discovered I was under attack,” said Mathewson. “The hidden services I was visiting were sending a signal saying what I was connecting to.”

He was shocked and immediately concerned about the danger for users. “Everyone who worked on this, including me, were about to get on airplanes,” Mathewson said. “I contacted Roger [Dingledine] and as many core developers as I could find who were awake at that hour. Not many were. I reached out to everyone at different hotels and figured out the best, immediate defense.”

There were only a few developers Mathewson trusted enough to work on it. They were spread thin but got enough trusted Tor directory authorities online to block-list the relays and servers involved in the attack.

Dingledine emailed the CMU researchers asking, “Is that you?” From that point on, the researchers stopped responding to emails from Tor. Their work, as it’s understood, has been decried as a huge breach of research ethics.

By the end of July 2014, Tor had issued a new version of its software with fixes for the attack and published a blog post about what had happened. Tor’s staff still believed at that point that the researchers had simply designed a reckless experiment with no intent to out users. But as the months went by, and law enforcement announced more and more operations that involved “breaking” the Dark Web, Tor’s anger at Carnegie Mellon grew. This month, Tor claimed, based on conversations with people it believes to be credible, that the FBI paid Carnegie Mellon $1 million to hack its network—a claim that the FBI and the university deny.

“The allegation that we paid CMU $1 million is inaccurate,” said a FBI spokesperson.

In the abstract for their Black Hat talk, the researchers said the attack cost only $3,000—presumably the hosting costs for its relay nodes. Putting aside Tor’s claim that the government ordered the attack, once it was known that the researchers were sitting on top of a bunch of IP addresses associated with Dark Web activity, the government would certainly approach them for the evidence, which CMU could have handed over willingly or under legal pressure.

Whether and what they handed over exactly, we still don’t know. But what the researchers gathered wouldn’t just be the IP addresses of child pornographers and drug dealers, but presumably anyone who used Tor between January and July 2014, which would include activists and human rights workers communicating in repressive countries, whistleblowers trying to stay anonymous while providing revealing documents to journalists, and other noncriminals simply trying to navigate the Web privately. Journalist and documentary director Laura Poitras has said she couldn’t have made contact with Edward Snowden or made Citizenfour without Tor.

“There’s an argument that this attack hurts all of the bad users of Tor so it’s a good thing,” said Mathewson. “But this was not a targeted attack going after criminals. This was broad. They were injecting their signals into as much hidden services traffic as they could without determining whether it was legal or illegal.”

“Civil liberties are under attack if law enforcement believes it can circumvent the rules of evidence by outsourcing police work to universities,” wrote Dingledine in a Tor blog post, which also questioned whether Carnegie Mellon had gotten approval from an institutional review board, a process that exists to ensure that academics don’t harm human research subjects.

Theoretically, Tor could sue the university and the researchers for, essentially, hacking its network. Tor spokesperson Kate Krauss says Tor is in the early stages of figuring out what it’s going to do legally. “We’re evaluating our options in this area,” she said.

“This attack was done without any regard for user privacy,” said Mathewson. “It’s the difference between studying epidemiology by looking at a virus in skin grafts and releasing the virus in the wild. The responsible thing to do when you come up with an attack is to get it fixed, not to carry it out on random strangers. That crosses the line from security research into malicious behavior.”

So, the big question many security-minded people have been asking since this attack was revealed is, ‘Can you still trust Tor?’

Mathewson says Tor has made major changes to its operation to prevent this kind of attack from working again, starting with “not extending security researchers the benefit of the doubt on anything.” It now has a set, strict procedure for how to respond when it sees a bunch of servers join its network. It will remove them by default rather than taking a ‘wait and see if they do something weird’ approach.

“We seriously revamped our code that scans the network for suspicious behavior,” said Mathewson. “We now have a ‘block first, ask questions later’ policy.”

A Tor server now needs to do more to control a bunch of relay nodes to be considered a reliable hidden services directory, said Mathewson. Those are the places in the Tor network that point people to otherwise “dark” sites not exposed to the open Web. Tor is also working on what Mathewson calls a “new cryptographic trick” that will allow a hidden services directory to send someone to a hidden site (which they identify with a .onion Web address) without the directory knowing where it’s sending them.

“We’ve been working on a revamp of the hidden services design over the last year,” said Mathewson. “The implementation is in progress but it’s not done.”

A larger problem is a lack of manpower at Tor; this attack was successful because a concerning development didn’t get the attention it deserved. This is indicative of a larger problem in the security ecosystem: many of the critical tools we rely on for the privacy and security of our online activity are understaffed and underfunded. At the same time that Tor was under attack in 2014, a security researcher discovered the Heartbleed bug, a software flaw that affected a large chunk of the Internet, which stemmed from a mistake made in an OpenSSL codebase relied on by scores of Internet companies but supported by just one full-time nonprofit employee. Tor’s decentralized, crowdsourced model has strengths, but its tiny operation, with few full-time employees, has weaknesses as well—one of which was exploited here.

Tor recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to try to increase its number of individual funders so that it has more freedom in how it spends. “We are internally obsessed with getting more diverse with our funding and having unrestricted money,” said spokesperson Kate Krauss. “We want to solve problems as we see them as opposed to what an institutional funder is focused on.”

As for the question of ‘Can people trust Tor?’, Mathewson had a pragmatic response.

“There is no computer security program out there with 100% confidence that everything you do is going to be safe,” said Mathewson. “We can provide a high probability of safety and get better all the time. But no computer software ever written is able to provide absolute certainty. Have a back-up plan.”
http://fusion.net/story/238742/tor-c...mellon-attack/





After Dropbox Finds a Child Porn Collector, a Chess Club Stops His Knife Attack

"I failed my mission to kill everyone."
Nate Anderson

Dustin Brown wanted a secure grip on the two knives he had selected to slaughter the children.

Before leaving his Morton, Illinois, home on the afternoon of October 13, the 19-year-old wrapped each knife's handle carefully with duct tape. He then pulled on a pair of grippy gloves. The one-mile journey to the public library gave Brown one final chance to rehearse the plan he had contemplated for the last two weeks. Five-inch blades jingled together in his backpack all the while.

Hanging over everything, child pornography charges threatened to ruin Brown's life. Despite some rudimentary precautions, his online cache of videos had been unearthed by investigators earlier in the year. Searched, arrested, and eventually expelled from Morton High School, Brown felt he had nothing left to live for. In this lowest of moments, he wanted only to destroy the lives of others before turning his duct-taped knives on himself.

Morton, a 17,000-person village just outside of Peoria along I-74, bills itself as the "pumpkin capital of the world." Its claim to fame lies in its thousands of acres of pumpkin farms, along with an enormous Nestlé plant that cans Libby's puréed pumpkin. Directly behind the Nestlé plant, across the railroad tracks, sits the town's single-story brick library. At 3:25pm, Brown walked inside and sat down at a table. He looked around. A chess club was meeting in the library conference room, and Brown watched the 16 children—some as young as seven—with rising rage. Furious at the legal charges against him, Brown saw a way to exact a twisted form of revenge against children. He opened his backpack and pulled out the knives.

Inside the conference room, 75-year-old instructor James Vernon looked up from a chess board and saw Brown running toward him. Brown held a knife in each hand; as he entered the conference room, he screamed out, "I'm going to kill some people!"

Though Vernon had spent his career in IT at the local Caterpillar plant, he had taken knife-fight training in the Army many decades before. He immediately stepped forward into Brown's path, trying to distract the young man—but also hoping to see which hand he might use to attack. Local newspaper reporter Michael Smothers spoke to Vernon afterward about what happened:

“I tried to settle him down,” [Vernon] said. “I didn’t, but I did deflect his attention” from the children “and calmed him a bit. I asked him if he was from Morton, did he go to high school. I asked what his problem was. He said his life 'sucks.' That’s a quote.”

As Vernon spoke, he stepped closer to Brown. “He backed away when I’d get closer.” With a few steps, Vernon put himself between Brown and the room’s door, with the children under the tables behind him.

“I gave them the cue to get the heck out of there, and, boy, they did that! Quick, like rabbits,” Vernon said...

Vernon watched what Brown did with his knives and learned.

“I knew he was right-handed. He was whittling on his left arm” with the one in that hand, “making small cuts. He was trying to scare me, and he did.” But if Brown attacked, “I knew which hand it was coming from.”


The attack came with a sudden slash. Vernon threw up an arm in defense, taking cuts to two arteries in his hand and wrist, before shoving Brown hard toward the tables. Brown landed with his bodyweight pinning his left arm beneath him, rendering the second knife ineffective. Vernon, bleeding profusely, grabbed Brown's right wrist with one hand and punched Brown repeatedly in the right shoulder until the assailant dropped the first knife.

Library staff rushed in to disarm Brown, holding him until police arrived minutes later. According to prosecutors, while Brown was being led out to a waiting ambulance, he told police and paramedics, "I failed my mission to kill everyone."

The violent conclusion to the story was unusual, but the child pornography investigation that set Brown off was not. Increasingly, such investigations aren't simply spurred by agents monitoring file-sharing networks or infiltrating the paranoid world of online communities dedicated to child sex abuse. While those investigations continue, cases today can commonly arise from tips lodged by Internet companies, especially those that provide cloud storage.

And in this case, Brown's case was set in motion by one of the most popular of cloud storage providers around: Dropbox.

Scouring the cloud

Brown had been using Dropbox to store files but had made no serious effort to hide his identity. His associated e-mail address contained the date of his birthday, while his Dropbox username was "Dustin Brown." At some point, Brown began to acquire videos of both pubescent and pre-pubescent girls engaged in sex acts, and he uploaded them from IP addresses in the village of Morton, in the nearby town of Pekin, and in Chicago. According to a prosecutor's affidavit seen by Ars Technica, Dropbox discovered the videos in December 2014.

Dropbox won't discuss the specific techniques it uses to identify child pornography, though the company has for some time been the target of speculation that it proactively scans user uploads against a database of known illegal imagery.

This is not particularly difficult to do. In 2009, Microsoft built a tool called PhotoDNA that automates the scanning and matching process, converting incoming images to grayscale and chopping them up into tiny squares. Each piece of image data then passes through a one-way hashing function which generates a unique number based on the square's shading pattern. Taken together, these hashes make up the "PhotoDNA signature" of an image; any future picture that generates the same signature is almost certain to be a copy of the original image. Microsoft claims that its multi-hashing system is powerful enough to detect illegal images even after basic tweaks such as re-cropping or watermarking.

Microsoft donated PhotoDNA to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which maintains a massive database of PhotoDNA signatures for child pornography images. (In 2009, the head of NCMEC said that his group was currently reviewing 250,000 suspect child sex abuse images each week.) To find a match, Internet companies can host a local instance of PhotoDNA on their own servers, which scans user-uploaded photos, generates a signature for each, and then compares them against the NCMEC database.

PhotoDNA has become the standard solution for automated processing of imagery at Internet scale. But the requirement for local installations meant hardware and IT know-how, preventing PhotoDNA from being more widely used, especially by smaller companies. In July 2015, though, Microsoft moved PhotoDNA into its Azure cloud and offered qualified Internet companies access to the tool via a REST application programming interface. PhotoDNA is free to use—and companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Kik all do—but it has one significant limitation: it does not currently work on videos.

It also doesn't work on encrypted files, which might seem to rule out its use by services like Dropbox. After all, Dropbox encrypts user data, bragging on its website about how "we store your file data using 256-bit AES encryption and use an SSL/TLS secure tunnel to transfer files between you and us." But this only makes content sent to Dropbox secure from outsiders—not from Dropbox itself. The company possesses the crypto keys.

Dropbox won't confirm or deny that it uses PhotoDNA. In response to questions from Ars about the Brown case, the company would only issue its standard statement: “Child exploitation is a horrific crime. Whenever law enforcement agencies, child safety organizations, or private individuals alert us of suspected child exploitation imagery, we act quickly to report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). NCMEC reviews and refers our reports to the appropriate authorities. We’re deeply supportive of their important work in the fight against the exploitation of children.”

The statement seems to suggest that Dropbox investigates when contacted by "law enforcement agencies, child safety organizations, or private individuals," but court filings in the Brown case mention no such tips. Lindsey Hall, superintendent of Morton Community School District 709 where Brown attended, also said in a press release that the information had come from Dropbox and that the company "conducts its own security scans and helped detect the illicit materials."

However it happened, Dropbox found Brown's images and reported them to NCMEC, which passed the tip on to the Illinois attorney general's office. That office runs a statewide "cyber crime" unit that coordinates among trained investigators at all levels. In this case, the unit tapped Peoria police detective Scott Gamboe to handle the tip. Gamboe—an Army vet, Ironman athlete, and author of self-published fantasy novels—took the various IP addresses associated with the Dropbox account and sent subpoenas to Internet providers. This turned the numbers into addresses, and the two most relevant resolved to Morton High School and to the home of Brown's mother. When combined with the Dropbox account information, the preliminary evidence pointed right to Brown.

On February 12, 2015, Gamboe obtained search warrants for Brown's home, his school locker, and his person. Those warrants were executed the next day by a team of federal, state, and local police officers and agents; Brown cracked immediately. In an interview with officers, Brown pulled out his "I-phone" [sic] and showed officers "a collage of 21 different images of child pornography... which defendant said he had downloaded" the day before, according to a prosecutor's later account.

Brown's typical strategy was to delete all local images as soon as possible, uploading them to services like Dropbox "for fear of being caught." In a pattern typical of many child pornography users, Brown was so committed to the practice that he didn't stop even in the face of obvious warning signs. When Dropbox disabled his account without explanation in late 2014, Brown allegedly started using a similar cloud storage service based in Russia.

The claim that Brown had accessed his Dropbox account from the high school's wireless network prompted Morton's school district to issue a note to parents soon after Brown's arrest. The district defended its security policies and explained why it simply didn't block services like Dropbox. "We have security and filters in place to prevent students from accessing inappropriate websites," the district wrote. "The school’s cyber-security system does not block attempts to access Dropbox because the file hosting service is a general file storage application that is routinely used for legitimate purposes." (A local news report noted that school board members often store files in Dropbox.)

Brown was expelled from school and charged with 22 felony counts of child pornography possession. Released from prison on a $12,500 bond, he pled not guilty to all charges at a hearing on March 24. His case moved slowly forward throughout the summer and fall, with Brown appearing before a judge on October 5 for a routine hearing. His next hearing had been scheduled for October 19, but it was preempted when Brown packed up his knives and headed to the library on October 13.

Tips and tricks

Dropbox has been involved with numerous similar cases. Three recent examples illustrate the common pattern:

• In June 2014, a 21-year-old man in North Charleroi, Pennsylvania, was accused of downloading child pornography onto his cell phone during work shifts at a local bowling alley. According to the local newspaper, "The investigation began in April, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children notified the attorney general's office that a report initiated by Dropbox.com that an account was flagged for uploading several media files in January." The man had allegedly accessed the Internet largely from his mobile phone, a Galaxy S4, and he kept the files "hidden" in a cloud storage account. (Like Brown's, the hiding was terrible; Dropbox reported that the user name was the defendant's actual name.)
• In August 2014, a man from Reading, Pennsylvania, was arrested "when Dropbox alerted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children of suspected child pornography being uploaded to the online media storage site, according to an affidavit of probable cause." The time from initial tip to arrest can take months; Dropbox had notified NCMEC in March, but the Reading man's computers weren't searched until May—and he wasn't actually arrested until August. Prosecutors said the Dropbox account contained hundreds of images.
• In July 2015, a Dropbox tip helped nab a man in Texas. According to a news account, "Dropbox played an instrumental role in arresting a corporal in the US Army Reserve on charges of child porn possession... Dropbox filed a report last month through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline, which led to the local police tracking the account and discovering pornography that involved a girl appearing to be under the age of eight, the affidavit said."

But investigators also uncover Dropbox accounts that contain child pornography without relying on tips from the company. In June 2013, for instance, a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agent in Idaho was investigating possible child pornography and had obtained a search warrant for the e-mail address set7@ymail.com. When Yahoo turned over the contents of the account, the HSI investigator drew up a list of all e-mail addresses that had contacted set7@ymail.com—including one from cubs_freak90@yahoo.com with the word "trade" in the subject line and the message: "Do you trade videos of boys? I love man boy hardcore." The e-mail contained attached clips of child pornography.

The "cubs_freak90" e-mail had been sent from an IP address associated with the West Point military academy in New York; a request to Yahoo revealed the name and address of the "cubs_freak90" account owner, Patrick Hester. A simple online search for "cubs_freak90" turned up a Pandora profile that also belonged to Hester—and it included a picture of a young man in military uniform. Another search for the name "Patrick Hester" unearthed the young man's Facebook page, on which Hester indicated that he was a West Point cadet.

How the Internet police mounted an international effort against "The Cache."

A search warrant for Hester's West Point dorm room was executed on December 18, 2013. As others searched his room, the two lead agents took Hester down to a break room. According to their writeup of the interview, Hester admitted that child pornography was "something that I have struggled with for a long time" and that he had sought help for his addiction from a church mentor back home in Indiana to no avail. (He had not told the mentor that the pornography involved children.) Hester allegedly went on to say that he had found other child pornography collectors to trade with by using a Russian website and that he relied on a Dropbox account to store and share his collection of 100 images and 20 videos.

Due to the illicit nature of child pornography and the heavy penalties for possession, "outsiders" are rarely trusted in the communities that trade this material. Agents must often discover and then infiltrate these networks by taking over "insider" accounts to impersonate trusted users. The technique was responsible for bringing down The Cache, one of the largest online child pornography rings ever uncovered in the US. And it's why, during his interview, Hester was presented with a "Consent to Assume Online Presence" form, giving federal agents the right to take over his e-mail and Dropbox accounts. He signed it.

Following a June 2015 trial—at which Dropbox and Yahoo both sent representatives to testify—Hester was found guilty of possessing and distributing child pornography. The Department of Justice publicly celebrated its win and noted that, when a federal judge remanded Hester to prison at the conclusion of the case, the judge had "underscored that the videos that Hester sought out and shared depicted children being tortured."

The surge

When researching my book The Internet Police, one common refrain I heard from prosecutors was that child pornography had been largely under control by the late 1980s—until the Internet made it depressingly common. Analog technology had kept child pornographers from operating at scale; films and photographs couldn't simply be sent out to a public developing lab, nor could they be easily encrypted and sent as an invisible stream of electrons. Creating, developing, and distributing child pornography required infrastructure—if you could even find fellow collectors.

In 2009, Ernie Allen, then CEO of NCMEC, said, "Twenty years ago we thought this problem was virtually gone." The same argument was made in 2013 by Kelly McManus, the Homeland Security agent who investigated Hester. In her search warrant affidavit, McManus noted that the old method had "definable costs" and required a "significant amount of skill."

But not anymore. The Internet, which provides simple global gathering places for every niche interest, has done the same thing for child pornographers. As McManus put it, "The ability to produce child pornography easily, reproduce it inexpensively, and market it anonymously (through electronic communications) has drastically changed the method of distribution and receipt of child pornography." The change has been so dramatic that computers are now "a preferred method of distribution and receipt of child pornography materials." As for cloud storage providers, their use as child porn repositories appears driven by the rising use of cellphones (as personal items, these never need to leave one's sight or control), a greater desire for security (images don't have to be stored locally), and the ease of sharing.

The effects of child pornography can be felt everywhere, even in smaller villages like Morton. The official Illinois Sex Offender registry lists two current Morton residents as guilty of past child pornography offenses, while news accounts from the last few years show that child porn arrests have become a semi-regular occurrence in the village even before the Brown case.

In July 2014, for instance, prosecutors charged two young Morton men with sex crimes. One of the men had enrolled at Illinois Central College, where instead of taking classes, a news account noted that he "spent hours, then 'all day long' looking at pornographic websites on ICC computers, a prosecutor’s affidavit stated. About 10 percent of the sites displayed children “as young as 10,' it stated."

As for the other young man, a former felon and alleged heroin addict accused of molesting a 14-year-old girl he had met at a church youth group, his name was Cody Brown. The fact that he shared the same last name as the knife-wielding Dustin was no coincidence; both lived in the same home on Fernwood Street.

On October 26, 2015, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner paid a visit to Morton. He was there to proclaim it "James Vernon Day" and to meet the man who had kept his chess club safe. The two met at the Morton Public Library, site of the attack, where Vernon still cradled his injured arm in a sling.

After the meeting, Vernon reflected on what Brown might face in prison. "They can’t let him out onto the street,” he told the local paper. “On the other hand, if he went out into the [prison] general population and they found out some chess geek had kicked his butt, he wouldn’t last very long, either.”

Vernon's actions drew national attention, but at the moment, he just wants life to fall into its familiar course once more. “It’s an interesting circus that I’ll be glad to step down from in a week or two,” he told the paper. “The kids ask about it and then say, ‘OK, now can we play chess?’”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...d-his-rampage/





Consumer SSDs and Hard Drive Prices are Nearing Parity

SSDs will be in more than 25% of new laptops this year, more than 40% by 2017
Lucas Mearian

The prices of mainstream consumer SSDs have fallen dramatically every year over the past three, and by 2017 they are expected to be within 11 cents of the per-gigabyte price of hard disk drives (HDDs).

The plummeting prices have also driven the recent adoption of SSDs in laptops. This year, they will be used by manufacturers in about 24% to 25% of laptops, according to a new report by DRAMeXchange, a division of market research firm TrendForce.

Next year, SSDs are expected to be in 31% of new consumer laptops, and by 2017 they'll be in 41% of them, according to DRAMeXchange senior manager Alan Chen.

Nearing price parity

This marks the fourth straight quarter that the SSD price decline has exceed 10%. But, as popular as they've become, the adoption rate will fall below expectations this year, DRAMeXchange stated.

"Branded PC vendors and channel distributors are holding back on their SSD purchases due to lower-than-expected notebook sales," Chen said. "However, 256GB SSDs will be moving close to price parity with mainstream HDDs in 2016, so the adoption of SSDs in the business notebook segment will rise."

While SSD pricing has dropped dramatically over the past three years, HDD pricing hasn't. From 2012 to 2015, per gigabyte pricing for HDDs dropped one cent per year from 9 cents in 2012 to 6 cents this year. However, through 2017, the per-gigabyte price of HDDs is expected to remain flat: 6 cents per gigabyte.

That means a 1TB hard drive will continue to retail for an average of about $60, though they can be found for under $45 on many online retail sites.

By comparison, consumer SSDs were selling for 99 cents a gigabyte in 2012. From 2013 to 2015, the price dropped from 68 cents to 39 cents per gig, meaning the average 1TB SSD sells for about $390.

Next year, SSD prices will decline to 24 cents per gigabyte and in 2017, they're expected to drop to 17 cents per gigabyte, Chen said. That means a 1TB SSD on average would retail for $170.

Consumer SSD shipments in the third quarter (including those from the retail SSD market) reached a total of 21.6 million units.

Third-quarter shipments of notebooks worldwide rose to 43.3 million units, up 13% from the previous quarter on account of peak seasonality, according to DRAMeXchange.

In the retail SSD market, channel distributors were conservative in their restocking efforts in the third quarter because they had expected NAND flash prices to drop further. Therefore, the retail SSD market's total shipments in the last quarter were disappointing by peak quarter standards, rising only slightly, Chen said.

Fourth quarter is the traditional peak sales season in the U.S. and European markets. Chen noted that while MacBook sales continue to grow and non-Apple branded notebooks with Intel's Skylake CPUs have hit the market, quarterly notebook shipment growth will still be constrained by ongoing inventory adjustments.

DRAMeXchange expects the SSD adoption rate in the laptop market to move up a bit to about 28% during the same period.

Since the decline in NAND flash prices and aggressive pricing from SSD suppliers show no signs of stopping, the retail SSD market will deviate from the seasonal pattern in the fourth quarter; global Client-SSD shipments are likely to see a slight quarterly increase of 4% to 6%.

In order to consume more capacity and gain market share, NAND flash suppliers such as Samsung, Toshiba, SK Hynix, Intel and Micron will maintain their aggressive pricing strategy into the first half of 2016, DRAMeXchange said.

In terms of SSD product strategy, Samsung will continue to use the price advantage it has with its 3D triple level cell (TLC) SSD and DRAM-less SSDs to gain more PC-maker market share. However, SanDisk is quickly catching up and has started mass production of its own lines of TLC-SSD and DRAM-less products since the middle of this year.

Other SSD manufacturers are rolling out products using 15 nanometer (nm) and 16nm-based multi-level cell (MLC) flash in response to the aggressive pricing of NAND flash memory.

Chen noted that the price war in the NAND flash market will continue into the first half of 2016 as major NAND flash suppliers work hard to consume capacity and capture market share.
http://www.computerworld.com/article...ng-parity.html





Western Digital Announces 10TB Helium-Filled Hard Drive Utilizing PMR
Jamie Fletcher

The high density storage market has become a rather bizarre mix of technologies and sizes over the last couple years. Desktop hard drives have remained at the 6TB level for a while, with servers making use of 8TB, and in some cases 10TB densities. WD today announced a new enterprise drive that allows for 10TB densities without using the SMR method, sticking to standard industry PMR write methods.

What makes this news so interesting? The catch with high-density drives is that they make use of a mechanical trick to better use the available platters by overlapping data. The method in question is called SMR, or Shingled Magnetic Recording. The read head is half the size of the write head, allowing for a smaller surface area to be covered, but since the write head is still full-sized, it can overlap the previous track. This increases storage density considerably, but it comes at a cost – speed and a new standard.

SMR drives can not typically be used natively by the OS or disk controllers, and instead often require extra software and/or firmware updates. This makes their broad adoption limited, since the drives are not drop-in replacements for the far more ubiquitous Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) method. In addition, due to the overlapping data, any rewrites require subsequent tracks to be rewriten too, significantly slowing down write operations. The end result is that SMR drives are meant for archiving, and not day-to-day operations.

WD’s latest enterprise drive offers 10TB densities using the industry standard PMR method, and as such is a full drop-in replacement for any standard hard drive. The drives will be released under the HGST Ultrastar brand as the He10. The other notable feature being the drives are filled with helium, rather than nitrogen/air.

The benefit of using helium is that it’s less dense than air, putting less strain on the motor. End result is a five or six platter drive that can spin up to 7200 RPM on less power, while improving reliability of the drive (2.5 million hours MTFB) – including a 5-year warranty. WD states the drive can achieve a power efficiency of 0.5 Watts per terabyte (reading the notes, this is at idle), which is 56% less power than the previous generation.

In addition to the helium, these new drives support both SATA 6.0GB/s and SAS 12Gb/s. The cache is just as impressive as the drive density, with 256MB made available. Other enterprise features are available with instant secure-erase and self-encryption over SATA with TCG.

Pricing hasn’t been announced just yet, but we’ll update when it becomes available. Because the drives don’t use SMR, it means that home-built NAS systems should be able to support these new drives, with support from pre-built NASes coming soon with a firmware update.
http://techgage.com/news/western-dig...utilizing-pmr/





Why Your New £600 Smartphone is Probably Not as Good as Your Phone from a Decade Ago

Regulator refuses to name names as technical research finds top brands failing to meet standards
Christopher Williams

Ever suspected that your £600, top-of-the-range smartphone is not as good for basic communications as the mobile you used a decade ago? Now there is official confirmation you are probably right.

A study commissioned by the industry regulator Ofcom has found that for all the technology packed into flagship devices by Apple, Samsung and others, a handset costing a fraction of the price typically provides better signal performance for voice calls and texts.

The research, conducted in controlled lab conditions on a selection of popular smartphones and non-smart phones currently on the market, found that on a 2G network the cheaper handsets were much better at picking up weak signals. Some smartphones require a minimum signal 10 times stronger than the best non-smart phone before they can make or receive a call, according to Ofcom’s research.

The experiments have been carried out as mobile operators come under pressure to increase coverage, particularly in rural areas where masts are typically further apart and provide a weaker connection to the network. But while network infrastructure investment is seen as key to improving coverage, handsets also play a significant role.

Ofcom’s findings will give weight to claims that the shift to smartphones encased in glass and metal rather than the plastic typically used in cheaper mobiles has contributed to calls being cut off. On average, the smartphones Ofcom tested required a minimum 2G signal seven times stronger than the average non-smartphone.

The research, due to contribute to more detailed mobile coverage maps, found smartphones performing below international standards for mobile broadband signal performance. On 3G networks the worst performer needed a signal nine times stronger than the minimum recommended by the GSMA, the mobile industry’s standards body.

On faster 4G mobile broadband the bottom of the class required seven times the recommended signal strength to send data back and forth.

For some smartphones the chances of being cut off also vary significantly depending on if it is held in the left or right hand, owing to the position of the antenna.

Problems with smartphone antennae are not new, however. Most infamously, Apple was accused of putting aesthetics over function in the iPhone 4 when it emerged that the new design meant calls were easily dropped if it was held in a certain position.

Ofcom, however, refused to name names in its research, arguing that the number of devices it tested was not sufficient to make statistically significant comparisons between individual smartphones.

The regulator also said that because some smartphones performed better for 2G signals but worse for 4G, identifying the manufacturers would be “unlikely to provide additional useful information for consumers”.

A spokesman added: "We tested a very small number of mobile phones, not for ranking but to understand how handsets performed in different situations.As no one device consistently outperformed the others we chose not to list the handsets."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...ecade-ago.html





GOP Again Tries to Kill Net Neutrality With Spending Bill Rider
Karl Bode

The GOP continues to try and gut net neutrality using fine print. Republicans have buried an anti-net neutrality rider into a government spending bill that would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from enforcing the agency's open Internet rules. Those rules were voted on in February and went into effect in June, though they're currently being challenged by ISPs in court.

With the government running on a stopgap funding measure that expires December 11, Congressional ISP allies are hoping to use the urgency to kill net neutrality. Specifically, the language inserted into the rider reads:

None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to regulate, directly or indirectly, the prices, other fees, or data caps and allowances (as such terms are described in paragraph 164 of the Report and Order on Remand, Declaratory Ruling, and Order in the matter of protecting and promoting the open Internet, adopted by the Federal Communications Commission on February 26, 2015.

Should net neutrality opponents fail to include such sleeper provisions, they'll look to the broadband industry's multi-pronged lawsuit against the FCC to do the job. Should that fail, the only real way to deflate the rules would be by winning the 2016 Presidential election and appointing a new FCC boss dedicated to killing the net neutrality protections post appointment.
https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/...l-Rider-135766





FCC Boss Mocks Comcast Broadband Caps at Industry 'Prom'
Karl Bode

Last night was the telecom industry "prom," or the Federal Communications Bar Association chairman's dinner. It's a night when most of the heavy hitters in the telecom industry get together to dine and congenially joke about the issues of the day, despite the serious impact most of these problems have on end users. This year's dinner was no exception, with FCC boss Tom Wheeler firing a number of barbs at industry attendees like former FCC boss-turned-cable lobbyist Michael Powell.

Wheeler was quick to make fun of how the industry blames anything and everything on the FCC's decision to reclassify ISPs under Title II to enforce net neutrality.

But the FCC boss also made a joke about Comcast's slowly expanding usage caps. More specifically, Comcast's historic refusal to even admit they have usage caps:

Wheeler had hardly gotten warmed up when he turned his attention to Comcast, which had a table at the dinner. Wheeler said the custom at the dinner was "to drink as much wine as you want." Then he asked: "Where's the Comcast table," then repeated himself and scanned the crowd. When the table had identified itself, the chairman went to work.

"Waiters, pay attention. If they want more wine, it's 35 dollars a bottle. And don’t consider it a wine cap. Just think of it as a wine usage plan."


That would be funnier if the FCC hadn't been sitting on its hands in regard to not only Comcast's expansion of usage caps, but its recent decision to let its own streaming service not count against the usage allotment. Comcast has tried to argue that because a part of the service travels over Comcast's "managed network," the practice can't possibly violate net neutrality. It's an argument both sides will potentially be debating in court should the FCC's net neutrality rules hold up under the industry's current legal assault.
https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/...ry-Prom-135792





Canadian Cable Company Has Balls To Shame Non-Paying Customers Publicly On Facebook
Rob Williams

If you've ever been late on paying a bill, it's unlikely that you ever thought that you were running the risk of being publicly shamed about your shortcomings. That said, whether you're late for a good reason or not, business is business, and your business with a service provider is generally intended to be kept private and not loosely for public knowledge.

However, for a few unfortunate individuals, one Canadian cable TV provider doesn't see things quite the same way. Recently, Senga Services, which is located in Canada's Northwest Territories, decided to begin posting the names of customers that had overdue payments to its Facebook page. As some of these late payments started at a mere $94 CDN, it seems there might not have been much leeway afforded to some customers.

The initiative was spearheaded by company employee Jennifer Simons, who felt so strongly about her right to expose late bill payers, that she debated with those on a Facebook community page who thought she was in the wrong in doing so. "People who can't afford servicves shouldn't get them. Period.", she writes.

As blatantly wrong as this is, Simons claims that public shaming has proven to be the most successful method of getting customers to pay up. The company seems to have begun using the practice as a last resort, as other normal methods of nudging for a payment were clearly not working.

Exposing someone's name and amount owed might be a gross breach of ethics, but Simons claims that it's not illegal. Before going forward with this practice, she contacted lawyers to make sure it was advisable to do so.

Nonetheless, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada urged the company to pull the post outing these tardy customers, and the company has since obliged. The Privacy Commissioner is now mulling whether this issue is worth investigating further. It would seem, whether or not Simons' or Senga's legal team think their practices are legal, that the right lawyer(s) representing any one of their maligned clients might have a field day staking a claim that it could very well cross the line otherwise.
http://hothardware.com/news/canadian...ly-on-facebook





Towns Want Verizon Investigated for Abandoning Networks Through Neglect

New Jersey towns petition state for fiber upgrade or better copper maintenance.
Jon Brodkin

Sixteen cities and towns in New Jersey have asked the state to investigate Verizon, claiming that the telecommunications company “has, through neglect, abandoned and retired its copper landline infrastructure in most of South Jersey.”

In areas where Verizon hasn’t upgraded its network to fiber, it has failed to properly maintain the copper wires used to provide telephone service and DSL Internet, the towns said in a petition to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU).

“In more affluent communities, Verizon has begun to phase out copper with more modern fiber” while “ignoring these issues in communities like ours,” Hopewell Township Committeeman Gregory Facemyer said in the towns’ announcement of their petition.

Verizon denies the allegations, saying it is committed to maintaining reliable service in rural parts of the state. Verizon said it has continued to invest in its network because of "fierce competition for communication services" throughout the state.

Verizon predecessor New Jersey Bell committed to a statewide broadband buildout in a 1993 agreement with state authorities in exchange for a price regulation overhaul that the telco requested. While many towns are still stuck with aging copper networks, Verizon last year struck a deal with the state to allow it to meet its obligation with cellular instead of wired broadband.

The towns’ petition asks the BPU to “investigate and rectify” Verizon’s “discontinuance of maintenance of copper landline facilities and infrastructure” in fiber-less areas. Verizon should be required to properly maintain landline infrastructure until it completes a statewide fiber buildout, they said. Cellular service is not an adequate substitute for landline or fiber service, they said.

“The failure of Verizon to comply with its obligations… to provide fiber optic service throughout the State of New Jersey,” combined with poor maintenance of copper landlines, “will effectively cripple the capability of customers in rural areas to maintain adequate telephone, data, and Internet service,” they said.

The towns say that phone, Internet service, and 911 access have been interrupted or lost altogether during bad weather events, including mere fog and drizzle.

“Literally hundreds of such complaints have been received in the Petitioners’ communities,” the petition said. The petition further claims that “Verizon has manipulated its customer complaint records” to make the problems appear less severe than they are in reality.

Verizon has “described fiber as ‘the best and most reliable platform to meet consumers’ communications needs now and into the future,’” the New Jersey towns said. “Yet for our struggling communities, Verizon refuses to even acknowledge there is a problem, much less offer to upgrade our copper to fiber. Rather than discuss these problems with us, Verizon’s representative has decried our concerns, comparing local government leaders to a modern day flat earth society.”

This is a reference to comments by Verizon New Jersey spokesman Lee Gierczynski, who claimed that town leaders “fear new technology” and are “irrational” and reminiscent of the “Anti-Digit Dialing League” that opposed an all-number telephone numbering system in the 1960s.

Gierczynski no longer works for Verizon but the company told Ars that his departure was unrelated to his public comments.

Verizon has spent “tens of millions” in South Jersey

Verizon told Ars that it “provides strong customer service” and is one of the state’s largest private investors of capital. Verizon also said it has invested more than $4 billion in its wireline network in New Jersey over the last five years, including "targeted" investments in the copper network. In the southern counties where the petitioners reside, Verizon has spent “tens of millions” since January 2014 “on new plant investment and maintaining the existing plant.”

The Verizon statement also said:

Verizon is committed to providing quality service to all of our customers, regardless of where they are. Verizon’s multi-billion investment in its wireline network over the last decade reflects that commitment as well as the fierce competition for communication services that exists across the state, including South Jersey. It is in Verizon’s best interest to not only meet our customers’ expectations but to offer the products and services they demand. We will continue investing throughout the state to ensure that the services provided over our network remain the most reliable and most desirable options for local consumers.

This commitment extends to the more rural parts of the state, where Verizon is investing to maintain reliable service on its network in those areas. Verizon continues to dedicate substantial resources to the maintenance of its copper infrastructure for the benefit of its customers in Southern New Jersey through its Proactive Preventative Maintenance Program.


When petitions are filed, the BPU can either review the matter itself or ask a judge to make a recommendation that the board can accept, reject, or change.

The cities and towns petitioning the BPU are Estell Manor, Weymouth Township, Alloway Township, Lower Alloways Creek, Mannington Township, Pilesgrove Township, Upper Pittsgrove Township, South Harrison Township, Commercial Township, Downe Township, Hopewell Township, Lawrence Township, Maurice River Township, Millville, Upper Deerfield Township, and Fairfield Township. Cumberland County also signed on to the petition.

Complaints about Verizon are not limited to rural areas. In October, the mayors of 14 major East Coast cities wrote to Verizon saying that the company has failed to provide fiber to millions of residents, in some cases failing to meet contractual or legislative deadlines.

Verizon has consistently denied such allegations. In New York City, Verizon said it met a requirement to pass all buildings with fiber, but the company's claim depends on how the word “pass” is defined.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...rough-neglect/





AT&T Plans on Killing the DirecTV Name Starting in January
Karl Bode

Not too surprisingly, AT&T plans to wean users off the DirecTV name after acquiring the satellite TV provider earlier this year for the rock-bottom price of $69 billion. The revelation comes courtesy of an notice posted to AT&T's internal employee website obtained by DSLReports. The notice indicates that the brand shift will begin in January and continue as the company revamps both its U-Verse TV and DirecTV services and end-user hardware.

That will include, as noted previously, moving all U-Verse TV customers to a "derivative" of the equipment currently used by DirecTV.

"We will continue to use DirecTV as the product name of our lead TV offer until the launch of our next-generation TV platform," AT&T states in the notice to employees. "Once we have established our next generation TV platform, we plan to transition all TV product names to AT&T Entertainment to symbolize our move to a single entertainment portfolio."

It's not entirely clear what that will look like yet. The company has previously stated that it's developing a new gateway that will allow third-party broadband connections, LTE connections and AT&T broadband connections. Users will be offered a mish-mash of options depending on whether or not they're inside AT&T's fiber to the node footprint.

AT&T executive John Stankey has said that the carrier is moving to "one consistent architecture" for all TV and broadband users that will involve "very thin hardware profiles," likely a nod to cloud DVR support. The company's set top, router and gateway hardware "will become a consolidated, single platform over the next 24-36 months."

Depending on how it's implemented, the unified branding could confuse customers who may not understand whether they're getting satellite or fiber to the node television services. And that may be the point. Such a unified brand may help obscure AT&T's frozen U-Verse deployments and lagging fixed-line broadband speeds. It's also possible AT&T's shifting entirely to satellite television to free up bandwidth on their traditional U-Verse platform.

The company was heavily criticized by Wall Street for acquiring a satellite TV provider on the eve of the cord cutting revolution, when its fixed-line FTTN platform already struggled to match cable broadband speeds.
https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/...January-135765





U.S. Court to Hear Challenge to Net Neutrality Rules
David Shepardson

A three-judge U.S. appeals court panel on Friday will consider whether the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) net neutrality rules are legal, hearing arguments from major cable and telecommunications trade associations and AT&T Inc.

The fight is the latest challenge to Obama administration rules requiring broadband providers to treat all data equally, rather than giving or selling access to a Web fast lane.

Such so-called net neutrality is a major issue for broadband providers like Verizon Communications Inc, Comcast Corp and others who fear the rules may make it harder to manage Internet traffic and make it less likely providers will invest to provide additional capacity. It is also a major issue for content providers like Netflix Inc to Yelp Inc who fear that they could see access to customers limited without net neutrality.

The appeals court has ruled twice against the FCC since 2010, and Judge David Tatel, who wrote both opinions, is on the panel sitting on Friday. He is joined by judges appointed by presidents Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan.

They will consider FCC rules set in February that bar "blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization" by broadband providers.

An open Internet spurs innovation and helps improve broadband infrastructure, the FCC argued, saying network companies ploughed $230 billion into the Web over 2011-2013, when open Internet rules were in effect.

But supporters of broadband providers in a legal brief called the rules "a naked effort by the agency to achieve its desired result." The FCC has classified the Internet as a utility, but broadband providers argue regulators "can't interpret the term 'land vehicles' to include 'boats.'"

Legal experts are divided about how the court may rule.

Former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, who served from 2006-2013, said the FCC "overreached" and argued the court was "highly likely" to overturn the FCC decision.

Cardozo law professor Michael Burstein, who filed briefs in support of the FCC, said the case won't hinge on whether net neutrality is a good or bad idea but on whether the agency had the authority to make the rules and if they violate the First Amendment.

Judge Tatel wrote the majority opinion in 2010 ruling against the FCC after it cited Comcast for slowing Internet traffic speeds to some customers who were downloading very large data files from peer-to-peer networks.

The FCC then issued new rules that blocked broadband providers from slowing or discriminating against Internet traffic and Tatel wrote the opinion that blocked those rules in 2014.

Congress has considered writing its own rules on net neutrality but hasn't voted on any proposals. The appeals court ruled in 2014 that the FCC had used the wrong legal reasoning to issue the rules, but said without net neutrality "broadband providers represent a threat to Internet openness."

The net neutrality rules are backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, library groups and companies including Twitter Inc, Medium, Yelp, Reddit. The companies filed a joint legal brief warning freedom of speech online "is at risk if broadband providers get to block or limit access to those voices they decide to disfavor - and that is exactly what petitioners are fighting for the right to do."

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-usa...0TN18D20151204





U.S. Government Reveals Breadth of Requests for Internet Records
Dustin Volz

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has used a secretive authority to compel Internet and telecommunications firms to hand over customer data including an individual’s complete web browsing history and records of all online purchases, a court filing released Monday shows.

The documents are believed to be the first time the government has provided details of its so-called national security letters, which are used by the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance without the need for court approval.

The filing made public Monday was the result of an 11-year-old legal battle waged by Nicholas Merrill, founder of Calyx Internet Access, a hosted service provider, who refused to comply with a national security letter (NSL) he received in 2004.

Merrill told Reuters the release was significant “because the public deserves to know how the government is gathering information without warrants on Americans who are not even suspected of a crime.”

National security letters have been available as a law enforcement tool since the 1970s, but their frequency and breadth expanded dramatically under the USA Patriot Act, which was passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. They are almost always accompanied by an open-ended gag order barring companies from disclosing the contents of the demand for customer data.

A federal court ruled earlier this year that the gag on Merrill’s NSL should be lifted.

Merrill's challenge also disclosed that the FBI may use NSLs to gain IP addresses on everyone a suspect has corresponded with and cell-site location information. The FBI said in the court filings it no longer used NSLs for location information.

The secretive orders have long drawn the ire of tech companies and privacy advocates, who argue NSLs allow the government to snoop on user content without appropriate judicial oversight or transparency.

Last year, the Obama administration announced it would permit Internet companies to disclose more about the number of NSLs they receive. But they can still only provide a range such as between 0 and 999 requests, or between 1,000 and 1,999. Twitter has sued in federal court seeking the ability to publish more details in its semi-annual transparency reports.

Several thousand NSLs are now issued by the FBI every year, though the agency says it is unaware of the precise number. At one point that number eclipsed 50,000 letters annually.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

(Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Christian Plumb)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/1...0TJ2PJ20151130





The Government Wants You To Forget It Will Still Collect Your Phone Records in Bulk
Marcy Wheeler

I Con the Record released two statements to mark the end of the Section 215 phone dragnet (which will take place at midnight tomorrow night): a statement and a “fact” sheet. They’re a curious mix of true statements, false statements, and probably false statements.

Here’s the true statement that USAF boosters aren’t retweeting (but which Jim Comey recently mentioned in congressional testimony):

Moreover, the overall volume of call detail records subject to query pursuant to court order is greater under USA FREEDOM Act.

Right now, the Section 215 phone dragnet is not getting some cell records, probably not getting all VOIP, and probably not getting non-telephony messaging. Even just the cell records creates holes in the dragnet, and to the extent it doesn’t collect Internet based calls and messaging, those holes would be especially problematic.

Which is why I’m struck by this language.

adopted the new legal mechanism proposed by the President regarding the targeted production of telephony metadata

[snip]

With respect to the new mechanism for the targeted production of telephony metadata,

[snip]

When will NSA implement the new, selected telephony metadata process required by the USA FREEDOM Act?


As I’ve noted, USA Freedom Act is technology neutral — the language of the law itself would permit collection of these other kinds of metadata. And while the House report says it applies to “phone companies,” it would be hard to argue that the maker of the most popular phone handset, Apple, is not a phone company, or handset/software manufacturers Google or Microsoft. So I suspect this is technically inaccurate.

Then there’s the deliberately misleading language, which is most notable in these passages but appears throughout.

On November 29, the transition period ends. Beginning Sunday, November 29, the government is prohibited from collecting telephone metadata records in bulk under Section 215, including of both U.S. and non-U.S. persons.

[snip]

That approach was enshrined in the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015, which directs that the United States Government will no longer collect telephony metadata records in bulk under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, including records of both U.S. and non-U.S. persons.


I’m sure the government would like terrorists and the press to believe that it “will no longer collect telephony metadata records in bulk … including records of both U.S. and non-U.S. persons.” In which case, this construction should be regarded as a huge success, because some in the press are reporting that the phone dragnet will shut down tomorrow night.

False.

Just a tiny corner of the phone dragnet will shut down, and the government will continue to collect “telephony metadata records in bulk … including records of both U.S. and non-U.S. persons” under EO 12333. Hypothetically, for every single international call that had been picked up under the Section 215 dragnet and more (at a minimum, because NSA collects phone records overseas with location information), a matching record has been and will continue to be collected overseas, under EO 12333.

They’re still collecting your phone records in bulk, not to mention collecting a great deal of your Internet records in bulk as well. BREAKING.

There’s one more misleading passage.

The legal framework permits providers to return call detail records which are either one or two “hops” away from a FISC-approved, terrorist-associated selection term. First hop selection terms (e.g., those that are in direct contact with a FISC-approved selection term) may be obtained from providers as well as from information identified independently by the government. These first hop selection terms may then be sent by NSA as query requests to the providers to obtain second hop records.

I Con the Record offers “those [call detail records] that are in direct contact with a FISC-approved, terrorist approved selection term” as an example of what it gets at each hop. But the language no longer requires that a “contact” be made — only that a connection be made. So it’s quite possible NSA will collect call detail records (which only need be a session identifier, so it doesn’t require any call actually be placed) of people who have never technically “contacted” the target.

There’s a reason they call this “I Con the Record,” you know.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2015/11/2...cords-in-bulk/





Surprise! The NSA Is Still Spying On You
Kate Knibbs

At midnight on Saturday, the National Security Agency ended one of its most notorious spying programs. This is only a tiny victory. The NSA’s sprawling, inefficient surveillance apparatus is still a privacy threat.

The bulk phone records collection program was banned in the USA Freedom Act, a law that curbed some domestic spying. This program allowed the NSA to collect metadata from American citizens’ calls en masse. Now, instead of collecting phone metadata in an expansive dragnet, the USA Freedom Act requires the NSA to first make a “specific query,” like a name, or a device number.

The USA Freedom Act didn’t make sweeping reforms. It nipped one program and left most others intact. The NSA stopped this particular program at the last possible moment because it would’ve broken the law by keeping it running a second longer—and it stopped knowing that it had plenty of other options for warrantless spying.

PRISM is still around, and it’s not alone

Remember PRISM? The clandestine internet-spying program where the NSA bulk collected internet communications from companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook? The one even a Republican Congressman who championed the Patriot Act called “more than the Patriot Act allows?”

PRISM gives the NSA access to a vast amount of data, from records of Skype calls and Gchat logs to unflattering unposted selfies. The only filter the agency uses to make sure it isn’t illegally spying on people within the US is asking an analyst if they’re 51 percent confident that the surveilled person is outside the US.

PRISM was never shut down. Somewhere in America a bunch of NSA analysts are PRISMing like Edward Snowden was a fever-dream twinkle in their spyin’ eyes.

PRISM’s not our only problem. The NSA shut down a bulk email metadata program called Stellarwind in late 2011, years after Bush Administration officials fought about its legality. But instead of not analyzing large amounts of domestic data, the NSA looked for alternate routes to it. Documents obtained by the New York Times earlier this month show that the NSA found other ways to continue to obtain and analyze domestic personal data even after it stopped Stellarwind.

One way was straight up abandoning a domestic spying rule: Before 2010, NSA analysts were only allowed to do large-scale graph analysis on foreign data. After 2010, NSA analysts could use domestic emails, texts, and other private online conversations in these graphs.

The NSA has plenty of other justifications for spying, too

The USA Freedom Act ruined one of the NSA’s favorite justifications for its spying program by blocking it from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which it had used to explain its phone data collection. But it can lean on several other dubious justifications to allow sweeping surveillance.

“Most obviously, there’s Section 702,” Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Andrew Crocker told me. That’s Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it gives the NSA authority to collect internet communications on (you guessed it) foreigners. The NSA uses it to justify stuff like Stellarwind. It was introduced in 2008, and it’s not up for renewal until 2017.

Another justification is even older. Reagan signed Executive Order 12333 to authorize foreign intelligence investigations back in 1981, and it has been a boon to upstream surveillance cheerleaders. The beauty of 12333 is in its empty, flexible language: Any information “incidentally” collected during an intelligence gathering mission focused outside the US—even if it’s the entire email history of a Minnesota teen or every iCloud photo from a Chicagoan’s iPhone—is fair game.

These loopholes and broad interpretations of orders are not totally unnoticed in Congress. “I will continue to push for reforms to section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – like closing the backdoor searches loophole,”Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told Gizmodo in a statement. “And I believe Congress needs to take a hard look at collection conducted under Executive Order 12333 as well to ensure it is not abused to circumvent laws or violate Americans’ civil liberties. As long as Americans keep demanding policies that protect both their security and their liberty, you can expect to see more reforms in the future.”

I want to emphasize here that this isn’t a situation where the NSA occasionally got a few US citizens’ private communications scooped up as it bagged a bunch of terrorists, like stray lobsters scooped up here and there in a shrimp boat’s net full of shrimp. (I don’t know how to fish, but you get my point. Also, I want shrimp.) For the email surveillance program, for instance, tens of thousands of Americans who were not suspected suicide bombers or manic gunmen or anything other than regular people with computers had their personal digital lives open for dissection.

These fishing expeditions suck, and they’re not over.
http://gizmodo.com/surprise-the-nsa-...you-1745256761





How Washington's Campaign Against Encryption Could Help Terrorists
Rudy Takala

Lawmakers are going after encrypted devices in a big way following the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris. But experts warn that doing so will actually hurt the average citizen and actually make it easier for terrorists to communicate without governments seeing it.

After the attacks, several lawmakers pointed to encryption as a contributing factor even before the facts had come out. Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., said it was "likely" that the terrorists used encryption to communicate. His ranking colleague on the committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., complained that encryption limited the amount of "good intelligence" that officials could gather. "Only good intelligence is going to keep people safe," Feinstein said.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, struck a similar chord in more generic language. "Technology exists today that allows terrorists and criminals to communicate in the shadows, using encryption that makes it impossible for law enforcement or national security authorities to do everything they can to protect Americans," Grassley said.

However, the specifics of any solution were vague. "We're going to have hearings on it and we're going to have legislation," said Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., without specifying what the legislation could look like. He added that encrypted communication is "unacceptable."

Yet on Nov. 18, French police found an unencrypted phone that had been used by one of the terrorists. One of its final messages was a text that said "Let's go, we're starting." As it turned out, there was no need for the terrorists to use encrypted communication. They were able to evade authorities without it.

For lawmakers who have long sought technical "backdoors" that would enable law enforcement officials to bypass encryption, that was bad news.

Industry leaders are opposed to weakening encryption, with companies like Apple and Google encrypting most of their users' data by default. The Information Technology Industry Council, a trade association that includes Apple, Google and Microsoft, put out a statement after the attacks affirming its opposition.

"We deeply appreciate law enforcement's and the national security community's work to protect us, but weakening encryption or creating backdoors to encrypted devices and data for use by the good guys would actually create vulnerabilities to be exploited by the bad guys, which would almost certainly cause serious physical and financial harm across our society and our economy," President Dean Garfield said in a statement.

Joseph Bonneau, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford's Applied Crypto Group and fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, elaborated on the position that many technical experts have taken. "Most governments naively believe they can mandate 'backdoors' or extraordinary access in a way that is available to 'nobody but us,' Bonneau told the Washington Examiner.

Bonneau added that the technical dimension is as problematic as the legal side. "Even if we could agree on the set of governments who should have access, in practice we've found consistently that attempts to build this kind of access end up with implementation bugs that can be exploited to gain access," Bonneau said. "It is effectively impossible to write software without bugs, and bugs in an extraordinary access system are particularly dangerous, which is why the tech community knows 'nobody but us' is impossible to achieve."

While the legal and technical ramifications are significant from an international perspective, that doesn't stop law enforcement officials, like FBI Director James Comey, from wishing for more effective surveillance methods.

"The threat posed to us by ... the so-called Islamic State, which, in the United States we talk about what they've been doing here, the recruiting through social media, if they find a live one, they move them to Twitter direct messaging, which we can get access to through judicial process," Comey said a cybersecurity symposium in New York. "But if they find someone they think may kill on their behalf, or might come and kill in the caliphate, they move to a mobile messaging app that's end-to-end encrypted."

However, experts have noted, a sophisticated adversary is going to adapt to find means of staying off the grid regardless of the legal status of encryption, which means that lowering security standards hurts average people more than anyone else. "On raw security terms, we are better served by raising the water level of global encryption," retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who led both the CIA and NSA, said in October.

"If the American government can insist that Google decrypt messages from Chinese citizens," Hayden added, "we've got to admit the Chinese get the same right to do that ... in the United States, because the Chinese definition of cybersecurity is just a hell of a lot more expansive than ours."

Despite the calls from some in Congress, it does not appear that any new laws will be passed in the short term. The Obama administration has leaned with relative consistency in favor of strong encryption standards, and in the days leading up to Paris, the president opposed passing any laws on the matter.

"As the president has said, the United States will work to ensure that malicious actors can be held to account — without weakening our commitment to strong encryption," National Security Council spokesman Mark Stroh said in October.

Though the president was not looking for a legislative remedy, Stroh suggested, the administration would seek to work with the industry in mitigating threats, adding, "We are actively engaged with private companies to ensure they understand the public safety and national security risks that result from malicious actors' use of their encrypted products and services."
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ho...rticle/2576953





Italian Authorities to Invest 150 Million Euros on Monitoring PlayStation Chat, Despite Discredited Link to Paris Attacks
Martin Anderson

Italian Minister of Justice Andrea Orlando has revealed that the Italian government intends to spend 150 million euros (£105mn | $157mn) on new equipment and techniques to monitor encrypted communications, including the PlayStation 4 game chat protocols which recently fell under suspicion as a means of communication by which ISIS may have coordinated the recent attacks on Paris.

It is not clear whether the ‘new instruments’ of surveillance about which Orlando spoke to Il Messaggero [Italian language] will be new to investigative authorities, or new per se – but the decision to make the investment involves not just equipment and technicians, but additional ‘cultural mediators’ in prisons, “to prevent these forms of radicalisation, that have developed in other countries in [the same] context.”

The quotes in the report indicate that this new investment and these new resources were requisitioned significantly before the attacks on Paris, and that Orlando is capitalising on Paris to publicise the innovation in much the same way that David Cameron did when he announced the addition of 1,900 staff to GCHQ in the wake of Paris – a development which had been greenlit significantly ahead of the attacks in Paris on the 13th of November.

“We had already decided to invest 150 million euros this year on reinforcing [our] information systems.” Said Orlando in the article, and continued: “The net offers numerous opportunities for communication. Antiterrorism investigations have highlighted the use of the [PlayStation]. Because of this every method of communication will be monitored with new instruments.”

Orlando called also for the creation of a central Bureau of Anti-terrorism in Europe, but one which would be subject to the higher authority of the European Union. The minister referred to a “jump in quality” in international terrorism to which the EU might not have yet responded at the highest level. Asked if the battle was ‘lost’, Orlando said “I fear it is, but I really hope not.”

The PlayStation network was cited by a number of media outlets as a possible planning arena for the instigators and organisers of the November 13th attacks, although no evidence was provided that this was the case. Three days prior to the attacks Belgium’s deputy prime minister Jan Jambon had said in a debate that the thought of ISIS and “hate preachers” passing messages via the PS network “keeps me awake at night.” Given the lack of any specific evidence against the PS network’s participation in the Paris attacks, the rollercoaster controversy on this issue seems to have started around the time of the debate and received an unexpected flashpoint during the attacks.

Sony responded to the increasing media furore to Eurogamer with a standard PR return that the PlayStation 4’s messaging encryption capability ‘has the potential to be seriously abused’, but also with reassurances that the company would always cooperate fully and enthusiastically with any investigations which needed its assistance.

The debate was greatly deflated when the International Business Times suggested that Jihadi terrorists might be writing self-destructing messages to each other by spraying bullets on the walls in Call of Duty.
https://thestack.com/security/2015/1...paris-attacks/





It’s Not YOUR Data, Didn’t You Know?
Hannah Leach

Identity. In the digital age, this is widely characterised by our data. Internet browsing data, consumer data, digitised public service records and biometrics.

A key thread linking many a Smart City talk today is the optimisation of public services through data technology. This encompasses everything from delivering healthcare to underserved populations to more efficient tax collection to crowdsourcing community solutions through digital engagement platforms. All this is just one facet that adds to our daily accumulation of Big Data, defined by IBM as the information that is “generated by everything around us at all times”.

IBM’s most recent brainchild, wryly named Watson, is a “cognitive” data processing system that incorporates aspects of Artificial Intelligence, allowing it to sift through largely unstructured data. The machine uses natural language processing in order to gauge grammar and context and is supposedly capable of providing bespoke data insights for any given customer on the basis of their questions. This model can theoretically be applied to all manner of public and private services including health, employment, disaster relief and public security.

On one hand, these records provide the opportunity to analyse human and environmental activity to a degree never before imagined. On the other, this relentless identifiable torrent of individualised information has close to eradicated any hope of anonymity for those in any way connected to the grid.

As so aptly put by Pakistani Minister (of Information, Technology and Telecommunication), Anusha Rahman Ahmad Khan at the Smart City Congress in Barcelona this month, “the greater our dependence on digital infrastructure, the greater our vulnerability” (as is the case with India’s Aadhaar mass digital identification programme) and the likelihood that this information can be used against us.

In a panel on “Privacy in the Smart City”, Gemma Galdon Clavell of Éticas made the unsettling observation that of all the exhibitor booths, only one dealt with data privacy and none with security. She also highlighted how data analytics giants are pressuring citizens to hand over their valuable details through gatekeeping tactics. LinkNYC, a congress exhibitor, is one such example of this.

Their “Smart” telephone booths in New York City propose free WiFi at 20x the average household speed, in a tidy little unit with tablet browsing and phone capabilities: ultimate ubiquitous connectivity in a box. In theory, this idea sounds great, right? Not exactly. These units are funded on hyper-local targeted advertising pulled from the data of its users, which they automatically hand over when opting in to use the free WiFi.

For those with limited access to such swift connections, it’s a trade-off between privacy and entry to the digital Garden of Eden. “Free” WiFi is a contentious term, when the costs add up in other ways.

According to a survey recently conducted by UK-based Digital Catapult, 76 percent of British people feel they have “no control over how data is shared or who it is shared with.” This is a figure that deserves some serious attention in the Smart Cities sphere, as we move in leaps and bounds towards total liberation of our personal data, and hand over the keys (knowingly or otherwise) to the analytical nerve centres of corporations plugging these products.

Carmela Troncoso, another delegate raising her voice on privacy concerns, also commented on the exhibitors. She noted there were only two types: those selling sensors and those offering data analysis solutions. It’s a worrying snapshot of the sector’s current disregard of individual data liberties in exchange for further digitisation.

Troncoso pointed out that, thanks to Big Data, it is now next to impossible to reside anonymously in a modern city. Why? Because data anonymization itself is almost impossible without using advanced cryptography. Our every transaction leaves a digital marker that can be mined by anyone with the right tools or enough determination.

It is the duty of world leaders to safeguard their citizens’ privacy, just as corporations are answerable to leaks and hacks. Furthermore, tech providers should be more transparent about the security concerns their systems pose to honest customers at the hands of unscrupulous leaders. It’s this public-private sector consensus that will shield global individuals from vulnerabilities, countering corruption and re-harnessing the power of the Internet and all its potential for positive development and social change.

Until then, just remember, it’s your data, and you have the right for it to remain that way.
http://www.citiesofthefuture.eu/its-...idnt-you-know/





Google Deceptively Tracks Students’ Internet Browsing, EFF Says in FTC Complaint

EFF launches 'Spying on Students' campaign to raise awareness about privacy risks of school technology tools

San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a complaint today with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Google for collecting and data mining school children’s personal information, including their Internet searches—a practice EFF uncovered while researching its “Spying on Students” campaign, which launched today.

The campaign was created to raise awareness about the privacy risks of school-supplied electronic devices and software. EFF examined Google’s Chromebook and Google Apps for Education (GAFE), a suite of educational cloud-based software programs used in many schools across the country by students as young as seven years old.

While Google does not use student data for targeted advertising within a subset of Google sites, EFF found that Google’s “Sync” feature for the Chrome browser is enabled by default on Chromebooks sold to schools. This allows Google to track, store on its servers, and data mine for non-advertising purposes, records of every Internet site students visit, every search term they use, the results they click on, videos they look for and watch on YouTube, and their saved passwords. Google doesn’t first obtain permission from students or their parents and since some schools require students to use Chromebooks, many parents are unable to prevent Google’s data collection.

Google’s practices fly in the face of commitments made when it signed the Student Privacy Pledge, a legally enforceable document whereby companies promise to refrain from collecting, using, or sharing students’ personal information except when needed for legitimate educational purposes or if parents provide permission.

“Despite publicly promising not to, Google mines students’ browsing data and other information, and uses it for the company’s own purposes. Making such promises and failing to live up to them is a violation of FTC rules against unfair and deceptive business practices,” said EFF Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo. “Minors shouldn’t be tracked or used as guinea pigs, with their data treated as a profit center. If Google wants to use students’ data to ‘improve Google products,’ then it needs to get express consent from parents.”

Google told EFF that it will soon disable a setting on school Chromebooks that allows Chrome Sync data, such as browsing history, to be shared with other Google services. While that is a small step in the right direction, it doesn’t go nearly far enough to correct the violations of the Student Privacy Pledge currently inherent in Chromebooks being distributed to schools.

EFF’s filing with the FTC also reveals that the administrative settings Google provides to schools allow student personal information to be shared with third-party websites in violation of the Student Privacy Pledge. The ability to collect and potentially share student information follows children whenever they use Chrome to log into their Google accounts, whether on a parents’ Apple iPad, friend’s smartphone or home computer.

“We commend schools for bringing technology into the classroom. Chromebooks and Google Apps for Education have enormous benefits for teaching and preparing students for the future. But devices and cloud services used in schools must, without compromise or loopholes, protect student privacy,” said EFF Staff Attorney Sophia Cope. “We are calling on the FTC to investigate Google’s conduct, stop the company from using student personal information for its own purposes, and order the company to destroy all information it has collected that’s not for educational purposes.”

EFF’s “Spying on Students” project aims to educate parents and school administrators to the risks of data collection by companies supplying technology tools used by students. The website provides facts on how data is collected, a case study, links to resources for parents and school officials, and tips for improving privacy.

Michael Godbe, a Fall 2015 EFF Legal Intern, helped prepare the FTC complaint, and Annelyse Gelman, EFF activist intern, helped prepare education material for the project.

To view the FTC complaint:
https://www.eff.org/document/ftc-com...ogle-education

For more information on EFF’s “Spying on Students” project:
https://www.eff.org/issues/student-privacy/

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/g...-federal-trade





With this Hire, the FCC Could Soon Get Tougher on Privacy and Security
Andrea Peterson and Brian Fung

The Federal Communications Commission has hired Jonathan Mayer, a rising star in privacy circles, to serve as its technical lead for investigations into telephone, television and Internet service providers.

He will work primarily on consumer protection issues, especially those having to do with security and privacy, agency spokeswoman Shannon Gilson confirmed.

Mayer is not your average bureaucrat: He's a privacy practitioner with a track record of shining light on questionable corporate behavior. And his hiring is a sign that the FCC hopes to bring an increasingly aggressive approach to protecting consumers’ personal data and their privacy to the next level.

His arrival also comes as the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission, long the government’s de facto online privacy watchdog, are trying to cooperate on handling online privacy and security issues.

The agencies have traditionally had different roles — with the FCC crafting rules for industry, while the FTC focuses more on law enforcement. But now they have shared territory.

The relationship between the two agencies grew more complicated this year when the FCC began regulating Internet providers like traditional telephone companies, a decision that opened broadband firms, such as Verizon and Comcast, to potential new privacy obligations. The move, aimed at preventing Internet providers from unfairly favoring preferred Web sites, threatened to limit the FTC’s ability to police the industry.

And the FCC has recently stepped up its enforcement of data security issues, going after telecom and cable companies for breaches of personal information for the first time. This year the agency’s Enforcement Bureau has collected roughly $30 million in fines for such cases.

Mayer will now serve as the chief technologist of that bureau. The 28-year-old computer scientist and lawyer was one of the minds behind a browser technology called "Do Not Track," which sought to give consumers more control over the way companies track their online activities. The FCC declined to make Mayer available. Mayer declined comment for this story.

Mayer is well known for original research. In 2012, Mayer spotted Google bypassing the privacy settings of Apple's Safari browser, effectively letting them better track the online activities of millions of people. The search giant later agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle FTC charges related to the practice.

And this January, Mayer revealed that an online advertising company used a unique code — which Verizon Wireless inserts into each customer's mobile browsing activities — to create undeletable "zombie cookies." The zombie cookies reappeared even if users tried to clear them from their browsers, better allowing the ad company to track people's online habits.

The finding conflicted with earlier claims from Verizon that its tracking mechanism, which it uses for its own digital advertising programs, would not be hijacked by other companies. After Mayer's research came out, Verizon let users opt out of having the tracker, called a "supercookie" by privacy advocates, inserted into their browsing activity — and the FCC said it was investigating wireless carriers’ use of supercookies.

Mayer studied at Princeton under now-Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer Ed Felten, and later at Stanford, which he only recently left for Washington. While in California, he consulted with current FCC enforcement bureau chief Travis LeBlanc on privacy issues at the California attorney general's office. The bureau has become more aggressive on consumer protection, issuing a series of fines against AT&T, Cox Communications and other companies for recent data breaches.

But that proactive approach has in some cases prompted probing questions from lawmakers.

"We are concerned that the [enforcement bureau] is exceeding its authority by undertaking 'fishing expeditions' rather than investigating specific violations based upon tangible evidence of misconduct," a group of GOP senators wrote to the FCC last week.

The senators underscored their case by pointing to a recent example that they said showed the FCC extending its jurisdiction to technology "that does not fall under any existing FCC rules."

Questions of the bureau's authority, and its limits, will only become more intense as the FCC moves to implement its net neutrality rules. The regulations subjected broadband providers to new privacy scrutiny as a side effect, prompting the FCC to rework and adapt its privacy rules to the Internet age. That process is still ongoing amid a debate about how to update regulations written for legacy phone companies.

As a result, the agency's net neutrality decision this year could lead to even more enforcement from the agency on privacy and security. And with those actions could come more financial penalties for violators.

That's different from the Federal Trade Commission, which generally doesn't write rules. Instead, it cracks down on misbehaving companies using its authority to police unfair or deceptive practices. For online privacy and security, that often means bringing actions against companies who have violated their own privacy policies. And even then there are limits on when it can levy fines.

Thanks to a quirk of the legislation behind the FTC, the net neutrality reclassification effectively barred the FTC from using its enforcement powers against the network activities of broadband providers.

The FTC has pushed to change that rule. "While the FCC gets penalties, we get redress actions. We think consumers lose out when we are not also the cop on the beat," said Jessica Rich, the head of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, at an event with LeBlanc this fall.

But a recent memorandum of understanding between the two agencies committed them to work together to protect consumer privacy and data security — and confirmed that the FTC has the ability to go after “non-carrier” activities of Internet service providers.

Last month, the FCC also signaled that it wouldn’t dig into privacy issues of companies that merely use the Internet to operate, rather than operate the Internet, when it said no to a petition asking it to make companies like Facebook and Google respect when a user’s browser sends the “Do Not Track” signals Mayer helped shape.

But even if the “Do Not Track” debate is off Mayer’s plate at the FCC, his combined legal and technical expertise could prove particularly helpful when drafting new regulations and identifying violations.

“Understanding the tools it takes to promulgate policy is an added advantage,” said George Triantis, a Stanford law professor who worked with Mayer as the co-director of the university’s Cyber Initiative. “He can see the legal obstacles and also be able to evaluate the range of instruments available."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...-and-security/





BlackBerry Exits Pakistan Amid User Privacy Concerns
Alice MacGregor

BlackBerry has announced that it will pull its operations in Pakistan from today, quoting a recent government notice which read that the company would not be permitted to continue its services in the country after December.

In July, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) had released a statement addressed to mobile phone carriers operating in the region, explaining that their services would be shut down for ‘security reasons.’

In a blog post released by BlackBerry today, chief operating officer Marty Beard confirmed the decision:

‘The truth is that the Pakistani government wanted the ability to monitor all BlackBerry Enterprise Service traffic in the country, including every BES e-mail and BES BBM message. But BlackBerry will not comply with that sort of directive. As we have said many times, we do not support “back doors” granting open access to our customers’ information and have never done this anywhere in the world.

‘Pakistan’s demand was not a question of public safety; we are more than happy to assist law enforcement agencies in investigations of criminal activity. Rather, Pakistan was essentially demanding unfettered access to all of our BES customers’ information. The privacy of our customers is paramount to BlackBerry, and we will not compromise that principle.’

Beard continued, referring to BlackBerry’s original statement in July when rumours of Pakistan’s demand first started circulating: ‘BlackBerry provides the world’s most secure communications platform to government, military and enterprise customers. Protecting that security is paramount to our mission. While we recognize the need to cooperate with lawful government investigative requests of criminal activity, we have never permitted wholesale access to our BES servers.’

Although the PTA was solely interested in BlackBerry’s enterprise business, BES, the company will also be shutting down its consumer branch in the country.

According to PTA chairman S. Ismail Shah, the body is still in discussion with BlackBerry – “hopefully it’ll be sorted out,” he said. He added that talks would continue over the next month and longer if necessary.

It is unclear how many customers will be affected by the Pakistan cut-off. However, the country is unlikely to be a huge source of revenue for the Canadian company. The move today signals BlackBerry’s dedication to upholding user data and security promises – a positive PR message for a company fighting a dwindling market share.
https://thestack.com/security/2015/1...vacy-concerns/





Israel Meets with Google and YouTube to Discuss Censoring Palestinian Videos

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely has met with representatives of YouTube and Google to discuss ways to cooperate in what she calls the fight against “inciting violence and terrorism”.

Israel’s Maariv newspaper reported yesterday that Hotovely agreed to work with Google and YouTube in order to establish a joint working mechanism to monitor and prevent the publication of “inflammatory material” originating in the Palestinian territories.

Since the latest escalation of violence between Palestinians and Israeli security services that erupted at the beginning of October, many people have been sharing videos depicting Israeli aggression towards Palestinians to highlight the Palestinian perspective of the conflict. London-based Arab newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed has expressed concerns that the meetings suggest moves towards censoring Palestinian material on the part of the Israeli state.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/ne...stinian-videos





Malaysia Invokes British-Era Law to Stifle Critics’ Voices
Anna Fifield

Online critics of the Malaysian government would be well advised not to spend too much money on cellphones.

“Just lost number four,” Eric Paulsen, an outspoken civil liberties lawyer and compulsive tweeter, said Nov. 20 after nearly two hours of questioning at the main police station here over his latest sedition charge.

Paulsen went into the police station with a shiny new Chinese handset, a Xiaomi, and came out without it. At least it was cheaper than the iPhone and two Samsung Galaxies that previously were confiscated from him this year, apparently because they are tools in his social-media activism.

His friend Sim Tze Tzin, an opposition parliamentarian who also was questioned that day, still smarts over the iPhone 6 Plus that was taken from him this year. “Don’t they know how much that thing cost?” Sim said, laughing, after emerging from his own session with the police.

Malaysia, ostensibly one of the United States’ democratic allies in Southeast Asia, is engaged in a broad crackdown on freedom of expression that detractors say is all about silencing critics of Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is embroiled in a corruption scandal. And the crackdown is particularly focused on online commentary, which is proving much harder to control than traditional media.

“The government has at least two intentions,” said Yin Shao Loong, who is executive director of the Institut Rakyat, a think tank, and is aligned with the opposition. “One is to stifle freedom of expression. The other is to harass the opposition and sap their energy and tie them up in court cases that could take years.”

Najib’s government has been making heavy use of the 1948 Sedition Act, a remnant of the British colonial period, which makes it an offense to “bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against any Ruler or against any Government.”

Among the three dozen or so who have been targeted so far this year are Azmi Sharom, a law professor at the University of Malaya who gave his legal opinion on a 2009 political crisis, and Maria Chin Abdullah, the leader of the Bersih group, a civil-society organization that promotes electoral reform, who has been charged with illegal assembly and sedition for organizing huge anti-Najib rallies in August.

Numerous opposition parliamentarians also have been charged with sedition, most of them for criticizing a federal court’s decision in February upholding the conviction of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on charges of sodomy. That case is widely viewed as political.

S. Arutchelvan, a socialist politician, was charged in the past week with sedition for comments he made in February. The well-known cartoonist Zunar, who in September won an International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists, has been charged with nine counts of sedition for nine tweets criticizing the Anwar conviction.

And two newspapers deemed hostile to the government were suspended from publishing.

“Prime Minister Najib Razak and the Malaysian government are making a mockery of their claim to be a rights-respecting democracy by prosecuting those who speak out on corruption or say anything even remotely critical of the government,” said Linda Lakhdhir of Human Rights Watch. The government, she added, should stop using “repressive laws to harass the media and intimidate its critics.”

The crackdown began after the ruling party fared poorly in 2013 elections, said Murray Hiebert, an expert on Southeast Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, but the repression has accelerated amid a corruption scandal that threatens Najib’s hold on power.

Investigators looking into the heavily indebted sovereign wealth fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB, found that almost $700 million had been deposited into Najib’s personal bank accounts, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

Najib, who founded 1MDB and heads its board of advisers, has strenuously denied any wrongdoing. Arif Shah, a spokesman for 1MDB, said the allegations against Najib were “old” and had been “comprehensively addressed” by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, which in August reported that no funds from 1MDB had been transferred to the prime minister’s accounts.

But amid investigations into the fund, Najib has replaced key officials with appointees deemed friendlier. The new attorney general, for example, has dismissed a recommendation from the central bank to begin criminal proceedings against 1MDB.

The prime minister’s office did not respond directly to questions about Najib’s links to the fund, saying the investigation continues, but a spokesman strongly denied suggestions that opponents of the government were being targeted with legal action.

“The Sedition Act does not impinge on free speech or democratic principles,” said Datuk Tengku Sariffuddin, the prime minister’s press secretary. “Most, if not all, countries have legal safeguards on the printed and spoken word in order to maintain public order. It is reasonable for Malaysia to safeguard itself in the same manner.”

Pending amendments to the Sedition Act, he said, would serve “to better protect all religions and to prevent the incitement of racial or inter-ethnic conflict.”

The changes would remove a clause outlawing criticism of the government and judiciary. A provision would be added to outlaw incitement to religious hatred in the country, which is 60 percent Muslim. The amendments, once ratified, also would increase the term of imprisonment for sedition from three years to seven years and add a penalty of up to 20 years in prison for seditious activities that result in physical harm or destruction of property.

The spokesman said that Malaysia has “a thriving online space in which opposition voices and publications are given free rein” and that government critics “are more outspoken than in almost any other country in the region.”

But critics of Najib describe an elaborate effort to silence them. The Malaysian government has long controlled newspapers and TV stations. Although the rising use of cellphones and social media has loosened the state’s grip on information, especially in rural regions, the government is trying to get a handle on the new technologies.

“There are lots of cybertroopers monitoring posts by opposition [members of Parliament], taking screen shots of them and then circulating them and tagging the police chief,” said the opposition parliamentarian Sim, who is being charged for a tweet in which he mistakenly suggested that the former attorney general was manhandled out of office. Sim deleted the tweet when he realized that the photo included was an old one and said it was a genuine mistake. Too late.

“The cybertroopers wrote, ‘Arrest Sim. He’s giving the government a bad name,’ ” the legislator said.

It is not clear whether these online monitors are hired by the government or are zealous volunteers. But they have been effective at alerting the authorities to criticism.

For Paulsen, 42, an ethnic Chinese lawyer who leads a human rights advocacy group called Lawyers for Liberty, problems began after the terrorist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January.

A government official said such an attack could happen here, prompting Paulsen to send out a tweet about the Department of Islamic Advancement Malaysia, or Jakim, which prescribes the sermons delivered during Friday prayers.

“Jakim is promoting extremism every Friday. Govt needs to address that if serious about extremism in Malaysia,” Paulsen tweeted. The cybertroopers seized on it. The next day, Khalid Abu Bakar, the inspector general of police, who also is active on Twitter, posted a photo of Paulsen and his tweet overlaid with the word “rude.”

Then came Paulsen’s first sedition charge. The second was filed after he tweeted that the most extreme forms of Islamic punishment, such as cutting off hands and stonings, were inhumane. The third run-in with the law was a criminal defamation charge after two tweets suggesting that Najib was trying to avoid questioning over the 1MDB affair.

Paulsen does not deny writing any of the tweets, but he does assert his innocence on the fourth allegation against him, which concerns a Facebook post showing a banner in a march that had been doctored to read, “Chinese pigs go home.”

“It was clearly fabricated to make it look like I had posted this,” he said, adding that it seemed designed to provoke racial divisions.

Paulsen said he thinks the efforts against him are part of a broader attempt to silence criticism of the government on social media. “If you’re from the opposition, are a dissident or are active in civil society, they’re going to come after you.”

But Lakhdhir of Human Rights Watch finds some cause for optimism. “A bright light for Malaysia is the strength of its civil society,” she said, “with many who are willing to speak out despite the risks.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...2c2_story.html





Murdoch’s British Tabloids Clean Up Their Acts
Sarah Lyall

A July article on a front page of The Sun on Sunday tabloid, owned by Rupert Murdoch, was a classic of its kind. Titled “Lord Coke: Top peer’s drug binges with £200 prostitutes,” its highlights included cross-dressing, bare breasts lined with cocaine and the 69-year-old deputy speaker of the House of Lords excitedly burbling, “I just want to be led astray.”

Two things were notable about the article, aside from the ensuing speedy resignation of the speaker in question, Lord Sewel. One was that the police, after raiding Lord Sewel’s apartment, declined to bring criminal charges against him — a sign of the newly wary relationship between Mr. Murdoch’s once all-powerful newspapers and the Metropolitan Police Service here.

The other was how unusual it was to see this kind of article at all these days. Since the 2011 phone-hacking scandal involving the Murdoch-owned News of the World exposed the extent of some tabloids’ reliance on so-called dark arts — illegally listening to voice mail messages, bribing police officers and hiring private investigators for illegal information-gathering and surveillance, among other things — the papers have had to clean up their approach.

Now, such exposés are few and far between.

“The days of the Wild West,” with weekly articles about randy footballers or straying M.P.s with their trousers down, are over, said Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian and current chairman of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian.

In place of these exposés are easy-to-report celebrity interviews, reality-television gossip and articles promoting the political agenda of the papers’ proprietors. In the case of The Sun on Sunday and its sister paper, The Sun, this means a lot of articles and editorials reflecting an anti-European, anti-immigration and anti-Muslim viewpoint.

Last Monday, for instance, The Sun devoted its front page to a poll that claimed that 20 percent of British Muslims supported Islamic Jihad, linking it to an opinion column with the headline “This shocking poll means we must shut door on young Muslim migrants.” (The Times of London, also owned by Mr. Murdoch, published a similar article and later printed a correction, saying that its headline had been misleading.)

The few drug and sex stings still orchestrated by the newspapers are subject to heavy legal scrutiny and, as in the case of Lord Sewel’s escapades, are justified by the papers on the grounds that they have a public purpose beyond prurience.

In the past, tabloid reporters said that they were bullied by their editors into using dubious methods to get scoops. For Graham Johnson, a former organized-crime reporter for The Sunday Mirror, the eye-opening moment came when an editor told him to dig up dirt on a celebrity who was supposedly having an affair with a gangster.

“I said, ‘How do you know?’” Mr. Johnson recalled. “He said, ‘I’ve been listening to her phone.’ And then he showed me how to do it.” Mr. Johnson, who said he quit after he illegally listened to dozens of voice mail messages and was made to follow the pair to a hotel, eventually pleaded guilty to phone hacking and was given a suspended jail sentence and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service.

The phone-hacking scandal — which intensified with the revelation that employees of The News of the World had illicitly listened to the voice mail messages of a murdered schoolgirl and quickly snowballed to include the closure of the paper — changed all that behavior.

After the phone hacking was disclosed, a number of tabloid employees were arrested. Hundreds of phone-hacking victims then sued News UK, Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper arm, and Mirror Group Newspapers, whose tabloids also engaged in widespread phone hacking. The victims won payouts totaling in the hundreds of millions of pounds. After a long inquiry, a judge, Lord Leveson, recommended an overhaul of press regulation. A shocked Britain reappraised Mr. Murdoch’s outsize role in law enforcement, politics and celebrity culture, and the unspoken laws of the tabloids were reconfigured.

News UK set out new rules for its reporters on topics like bribing public officials (do not), paying for stories (only sometimes), using private investigators (only with approval) and collecting private information electronically (do not do that, either). Employees are also required to have training on conflicts of interest, bribery, technology, workplace conduct, electronic communications and whistle-blowing.

In addition to the charges brought against dozens of journalists from various organizations, a number of police officers have been convicted of accepting money from tabloids — even as the journalists, in some cases, have been acquitted of the same offense. This has damaged the formerly symbiotic relationship between the two groups.

“There’s been a complete breakdown in relations between reporters and the police,” said Scott Hesketh, a former crime editor at the tabloid The Daily Star. Mr. Hesketh used to pay the police and a string of contacts in prisons and in the court system for stories, he said, often to expose wrongdoing.

“In the old days, I would have been able to call a normal copper and say, ‘Can you give me guidance?’” Mr. Hesketh said. “That’s all changed.”

Furious about all the prosecutions, the Murdoch tabloids regularly inveigh against the Crown Prosecution Service, particularly when it comes to prosecuting reporters.

“A truly grotesque amount of taxpayers’ money has been spent on Operation Elveden,” Graham Dudman, former managing editor of The Sun, told reporters after being acquitted of bribing public officials last spring, using the police investigation’s formal name. “It has now been exposed for what it is — a politically motivated witch hunt against tabloid journalism.”

On the surface, many things seem unchanged. With circulations of 1.8 million and 1.5 million, The Sun and The Sun on Sunday are still the largest-selling newspapers in Britain. Earlier this fall, Rebekah Brooks, who resigned from the Murdoch empire but was acquitted of various crimes in 2014, was reinstated to, basically, her old job as chief executive of News UK.

Mr. Murdoch still remains a major behind-the-scenes player in British politics, using his papers to rail against his commercial competitors like the BBC and Channel 4, among other things.

But times have changed, even for him. Consider Mazher Mahmood, the so-called Fake Sheikh and a Murdoch favorite, who was an undercover reporter for The News of the World and The Sun on Sunday. His identity concealed behind elaborate disguises, Mr. Mahmood regularly entrapped public officials and celebrities into committing crimes, caught their misdeeds on camera and exposed them in print. He has bragged that his articles have resulted in more than 100 convictions.

But a 2013 sting, in which Mr. Mahmood posed as a Bollywood director and supposedly persuaded a pop singer to sell him cocaine, ended in disgrace for the reporter. The judge in the subsequent criminal case threw out the charges against the singer, Tulisa Contostavlos, and accused Mr. Mahmood of misleading the court. Mr. Mahmood is currently awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

Rather than publicly defending Mr. Mahmood, as it most likely would have once done, The Sun on Sunday suspended him. It will not say whether or not it is paying his legal bills.

“The British press has had to clean up its act,” Mr. Hesketh said, “and it has cleaned up its act.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/bu...heir-acts.html





Prenda Principle Paul’s Property Seized to Pay Bankruptcy Debts
K`Tetch

It’s not been a good year for Paul Hansmeier, the Prenda attorney-turned-“ADA Champion”. He’s been hit with counter-claims on his Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) lawsuits which claim thousands in damages from local companies despite no actual issues. This was followed in May by an appeal hearing on Judge Wright’s infamous Star Trek order where after summing up the Prenda business model 9th circuit Appeals Judge Pregerson called it an “Ingenious crooked extortionate operation”.

Then in August, one of the three central figures in the Prenda saga, Paul Duffy, died, moving the focus more squarely onto Hansmeier and Steele. Finally, just over two weeks ago, the Minnesota Law Board started proceedings to disbar him, meaning his ability to continue as a lawyer at all would be in jeopardy.

Amongst all that, in July Hansmeier filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy (RECAP docket), seeking to repay his debts (many of which are damages and costs from various Prenda cases nationwide) totalling $2.43Million (€2.23M, or £1.6M) via instalments. Under US Bankruptcy law, a person owed money by someone in Chapter 13 proceedings cannot start or continue collection proceedings, so for Hansmeier, it would have been a neat way to push payment of these debts down the road, while paying them off at a fraction of their value. (His proposed plan would have paid off a maximum of $161,400 in monthly instalments of $2,690 across 5 years legal maximum at which point all debts would be discharged and considered paid)

However, petitions by the creditors (those who are owed money) pointed out in motions leading up to a December 3rd hearing at the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Minnesota that He had shown he was not trustworthy. “The argument that somehow there’s going to be a payment in full, your honor, just doesn’t ring true,” Michael R Fadlovich, the attorney representing the Bankruptcy Trustee is reported to have said.

Even Hansmeier’s lawyer admitted “he’s a bad actor”, but claimed “he’d found Jesus”, although given the number of Doe’s filed against, it’s entirely possible Jesus was found by their speculative invoice letters. She also claimed that the sale of Hansmeier’s downtown Mineapolis condo for $1.2M would have provided a rare chance to have his debts mostly paid off, despite figures submitted by the trustee that indicate less than $90,000 would be realised by the sale

Nevertheless, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kathleen H. Sanberg was not swayed, converting the proceedings from Chapter 13 to Chapter 7, and requiring a liquidation of assets to pay, while any money left from the sale of the condo goes towards the debt fund. However, the court is not yet finished with Hansmeier. Numerous lawyers (representing creditors) highlighted a number of suspicious money transfers, possibly to hide assets, as other judges have already discovered. At issue was his constant dishonesty with courts, in this proceeding and others, which the judge sided with. While further actions are coming, Hansmeier has to now be very careful, as bankruptcy fraud is an imprisonable offence, and investigated by the FBI who are presumably already well aware of Mr Hansmeier courtesy of Judge Wright.

It seems that Hansmeier’s ‘luck’ has just about run out.
http://ktetch.co.uk/2015/12/prenda-p...kruptcy-debts/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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